[HN Gopher] Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) (2018) ___________________________________________________________________ Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) (2018) Author : kornish Score : 66 points Date : 2021-02-07 08:14 UTC (14 hours ago) (HTM) web link (adr.github.io) (TXT) w3m dump (adr.github.io) | mountaineer wrote: | I first learned about ADRs in a course led by Michael Nygard, | author of the book Release It | (https://pragprog.com/titles/mnee2/release-it-second-edition/). | Since then, I've seen them used well by our Platform Team | (Scaling/SRE/Infra), but our product teams have not adopted. | | Interesting to also read Nygard's post from 2011 on ADRs: | https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2011/11/15/documenting-archit... | vikingcaffiene wrote: | We just started using these at my job. I like how the approach | takes the conversation out of a slack thread and generates some | documentation to boot. The tooling ecosystem is also excellent | (adr-tools is awesome) and you can easily integrate stuff like | confluence document generation as part of your ci pipeline. | | We've taken the approach of submitting adrs as a pull request on | the repo they affect (we have a dedicated repo for higher level | adrs) and submit the link to a dedicated slack channel so folks | can have a look and submit any comments they might have on the | proposed decision. Once everything has been hashed out, we either | merge the PR and get busy implementing the idea or close out the | PR and move on. | GSGBen wrote: | I started using something like these a little while back and | they're phenomenal. Nothing like being able to answer "what the | hell was I thinking 6 months ago?", or a stakeholder's "why are | we doing it this way?". Also great for getting a new contributor | up to speed. My preferred format is a simple Excel table: ID, | Date, Area, Decision, Reason, People Involved. | sdfhbdf wrote: | There is a nice discussion around a GitHub blog post about them | from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146594 | | This could give some context to people hearing about ADRs for the | first time | ryeguy wrote: | How do RFCs and ADRs play together? Would you consider a | finalized RFC (all comments/concerns addressed in some way) to be | an ADR? | vaughandroid wrote: | We use at both in my department at work. They is some overlap, | but since each have different strengths I think they work well | together. | | RFCs are great for capturing discussions and exploring ideas in | depth. You can get deep into the details if needed. ADRs are | all about capturing a decision. They should capture the | important bits of context and consequences, but without a huge | amount of detail. | | In terms of the process for producing these documents, if a | decision is straightforward we will go straight to writing an | ADR. If there are multiple options or we want to explore some | corner cases, we'll start with an RFC. An ADR is often part of | he output of an RFC which reaches consensus, but not always. | Related RFCs and ADRs include links to one another. | | If people are looking to get up to speed on something, their | first port of call is the ADRs. If they have concerns, disagree | with a past decision, or simply want to know more then they can | dig into the RFCs. | [deleted] | GordonS wrote: | Anyone know of any OSS projects that are using ADRs? | | I'd love to see some examples of them being used in the wild. | draklor40 wrote: | https://github.com/backstage/backstage | | Makes it easy to understand the reasoning behind a lot of | decisions. | doctor_eval wrote: | I haven't seen backstage before and it looks awesome. Thanks! | jph wrote: | Yes this open source repo: | | https://github.com/joelparkerhenderson/architecture_decision... | | See the `examples` directory for real ADRs, such as for CSS | frameworks (e.g. Bulma), secrets storage (e.g. Bitwarden, | Vault), programming language stack (e.g. Typescript, Rust), | etc. | _nhynes wrote: | https://github.com/oasisprotocol/oasis-core/tree/master/docs... | | This one was my first exposure to ADRs. I liked how they went | with something standard instead of doing the blockchain | traditional X Improvement Proposal (BIP, EIP). | The_rationalist wrote: | IMHO Architecture is a too vague term, there can be many | decisions that will be user facing and that doesn't alter the | "overall architecture" of the software. Calling them Technical | decisions records or simply decision records would be better and | less cargo-culting prone. | dijit wrote: | I tried using these multiple times (I even know a contributor to | this endeavour) but I always struggled with what the scope should | be. | | For a little bit of context, I work with server architecture in a | role that used to be defined as sysadmin, then devops and now | SRE. | | But there's many decisions a day and there is a huge trade off in | having many records (which become essentially write-only as | nobody will trawl through) or too few (which leave some gaps or | become very large). | | Has anyone found a good threshold for what should be a new ADR | from an ops perspective. | ta988 wrote: | I'm interested in those kind of software related processes | documentation approaches. If you have other similar things I | would be happy to check them out. | baconforce wrote: | Regardless of whether one chooses to use ADRs or not, recording | the factors that went into a major decision is a great practice | which can help counter the tendency to use Resulting. That is, we | have a tendency to judge whether or not a decision was sound | based on the outcome, rather than all the factors and conditions | that made up the decision at the time we were making it. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-02-07 23:01 UTC)