ADR
Adopt
Architecture Decision Records
ADR is a lightweight documentation of important architecture decisions taken by the team. Without documentation of the architecture and the architecture decisions, new team members can only do two things:
- either (blindly) accept what they find and see
- (blindly) change things
Therefore, we suggest documenting the important architecture decisions. We use a simple tool such as https://github.com/npryce/adr-tools and store them in version control. For company wide decisions involving several product development team, we also establish an architecture board with regular meetings.
The main purpose of this documentation is to:
- inform new team members about the previous architecture decisions and their purpose and backgrounds
- inform the whole team (including all people who were absent)
- create documentation that can be used to remember things (e.g. conventions, patterns, etc.)