Architecture Decision Record
published on 2022/04/06
One positive benefit of the pandemic and the shift to remote and hybrid work is increased asynchronous communication, which can manifest as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs).
ADR is one of the more interesting idea being surfaced by this InfoQ survey of architecture trend. The good thing is that it is a light practice and it can be adopted easily by teams to document their architectural decisions.
An architecture decision record is a short text file in a format similar to an Alexandrian pattern. (Though the decisions themselves are not necessarily patterns, they share the characteristic balancing of forces.) Each record describes a set of forces and a single decision in response to those forces. Note that the decision is the central piece here, so specific forces may appear in multiple ADRs.
You can read more about ADR here.