Architecture Documentation

Architecture documentation helps teams understand why a system is shaped the way it is, how its major parts fit together, and which trade-offs influenced important decisions.

Good documentation is not a separate artifact for auditors. It is a working memory for the team - the kind of information that helps developers make better decisions today because they understand what was decided yesterday and why.

Architecture documentation is not about writing everything down. It is about preserving the information that helps teams understand, maintain, and evolve a system over time.

Topics

Architecture Decision Records

Capture the context, decision, consequences, and stakeholders behind important architectural choices. Preserve the reasoning that future team members would otherwise have to rediscover.

arc42 (Coming soon)

A structured template for documenting software and system architectures. Covers context, building blocks, runtime behavior, deployment, quality requirements, risks, and decisions.