“Why did we decide this?” – every developer in history, 12 months after making a decision.

As technologists, we make architectural decisions all of the time. What we’re not good at doing is:

• Socializing these decisions though the team/department (whoever participated in the discussion has the context, everyone else is out of luck!)
• Recording the decisions, and more importantly, the context behind the decisions, in a way that our future selves (or anyone – someone just joining the team, for example) can look back and understand why the decision was made and what the factors that went into the decision were.

Enter ADRs. First proposed by Michael Nygard, Architectural Decision Records provide a way to capture these decisions as part of the codebase that you’re working on; where the rubber meets the road.

In this five minute ignite talk, we’ll go through the case for ADRs and a simple primer and how to get started using this technique in your projects.

I have over twenty years of experience crafting elegant, simple solutions for complex problems. Over this time, I have worked in consulting and industry, with a focus on retail, eCommerce, and the