This course will take you from no documentation to implementing a documentation system that captures decisions and is easy-to-use for all stakeholders.

We first talk about the concept of architecture decisions records, We know that architectural decisions can have a lot of actors and factors involved. When you can capture the evolution of a decision, its context, the decision makers, what was considered, what was eliminated, what might have not been considered, and any other important details for the decision, everybody wins. Future you wins because you no longer are expected to carry all of that in your head. Technical stakeholders can understand why certain technologies make more sense.

Non-technical stakeholders can also have a better understanding of why things are done a certain way. This is why we expand the course beyond architectural decisions and include general decisions. Why did we choose a particular vendor or this platform? What were the considerations? Was it purely a cost-based decision? Were their features that really appealed to our needs?

Where do you store this documentation? Do you leave it in a GitHub repo where the non-technical stakeholders might not feel comfortable navigating through things? Do you have pages upon pages in Confluence? Do you keep them in documents in a folder on the network or on the intranet? Is there a better place for this?

What about decisions that were made in the past? If we have the people who made the decisions with some context still available, is it worth capturing past decisions? When do we document these decisions?

Are there templates that we can use? How can we leverage AI with these records?

These are some of the many points that will be covered in this course!


Let's talk about decisions and capturing them as decision records!