Project Lionheart: The Story So Far…

The team has done a good job of making diagrams and sketching during design discussions, but pictures of whiteboards are not a replacement for a good old-fashioned architecture description.

Since our team is small and co-located, you decide to continue using whiteboard sketches and system metaphors, but you encourage us to also start recording design decisions as architecture decision records. Metaphors and whiteboard drawings let us thrash quickly and cheaply. Recording ADRs as we make decisions creates a public record that is easier to share among the team and with future developers.

You decide to delay creating a formal architecture description. A more official document should be easier to write later in the life cycle. The ideas it contains will also be less likely to expire before we finish preparing the document since most design decisions will be set in code by then. Our primary audience is the next team after us. When the time comes, you think it will make sense to create teachability, deployment, and strategic change (extensibility) viewpoints.