---
title:      "ADR"
ring:       assess
quadrant:   methods-and-patterns

---
Architecture Decision Records

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 (blindy) accept what they find and see  or
* (blindy) change things

Both is of course not right.

Therefore we suggest to document the important architecture decisions. We are using a simple tool like https://github.com/npryce/adr-tools and store them in version control.
In bigger projects with many teams we also establish a regular "architecture board / coi" with regular meetings.
Often the architecture decision are taken in such meetings.

The main purpose of this documentation is:
* inform new team members about the previous architecture decisions and its purpose and backgrounds
* inform the whole team (also all the people who where absent)
* documentation that can be used to remeber things (e.g. conventions, patterns, etc)