The Cure for Architectural Amnesia
05 Dec 2016The Cure for Architectural Amnesia
How often do you find yourself introducing your codebase to a new teammate, and you can’t quite remember why you did something one way, but you’re really sure there was a good reason for it?
An architectural decision record provides that history by acting as a collection of architecturally significant decisions, in a succinct, structured format, which describes exactly how something changed at a given point in time. They provide a way to understand how and why an architecture has evolved as it has grown.
Because hoping you/your coworkers/team will remember that discussion/email thread/slack conversation is not a solution. I’ve thought of products I wanted to build to try and solve this problem, but this is the first actual simple implementation I’ve seen that would actually work. I’m sold.