Just another opion of many that are out on the Internet.

Architecture guides planning, design, implementation and testing and identifies key principles to be applied to the solution design. The architecture decision documents helps to maintain a record of the important decisions made during the development of the broader Enterprise Architecture. A well documented architecture decision includes it’s own justification and evaluation criteria.

Architectural decisions could relate to important decisions about all aspects of architecture including the structure of the system, the provision and allocation of function, the contextual fitness of the system and adherence to standards. It will contain the reasoning for each of the decisions and where necessary reference external documents that further explain the recommendation / decisions.

Purpose

The purpose of the architectural decision document is to:

1. Record important architectural decisions, with relevant standards, policies and evaluation criteria
2. Make explicit the rationale and justification of the decisions
3. Enforce standards, policies and the need for broader review that lead to consistency and alignment across business and architectural goals and priorities
4. Provide a reference of documented decisions for new people who join the project or for interested stakeholders
5. Avoid unnecessary reconsideration of the same issues

Outcomes

The architecture decisions document can be used either to deal with individual decisions that are required (including architectural reviews) or as a record of all architecture decisions made within a project. This is typically determined by the Enterprise / Project Architecture and / or the project manager.

The Enterprise decision document can be used for maintaining a final copy of all architecture decisions for future reference. However, a non-authoritative copy of an Architecture Decisions document developed for project work should also exist in the set of project documentation artifacts.

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