The Power of the Paper Trail: Architecture Decision Records (ADRs)

The ultimate output of knowledge work,in this case software architecture and engineering, is decision making. Regardless of what form it takes, recording the thought process of key decisions is an important part of maintaining clarity before, during and after decision are agreed upon, to help prevent hind-sight bias and to allow your future self and others, understand the environment in which the decisions were made. In this post I will be sharing what I have been learning about Architecture Decision Records their applications in software and data projects. What are ARDs anyway? Architecture Decision Records are essentially a paper trail for significant architectural decisions that you make in the lifecyle of a project. I will mostly refer to them as ADRs from now on. In my years as an software engineer and data engineer, I have scarcely, if at all come across this ADRs. Documentation has taken many forms in the projects I have been apart of; abandoned Notion pages, diagrams and sparse