Lesson 157 - Incorporating ADRs Into Existing Systems

[@craftsmanengineering]

After a long day of working, after 8PM, I go to a coffee shop, order a cup of coffee, setup my AirPods and connect them to my phone. I open a video of your Channel and enjoy my evening. Thanks for your amazing content.

[@markrichards5014]

That's perhaps the nicest comment I've had :-). Glad I could be part of your evening!

[@babusivaprakasam9846]

Consistent effort! Brilliant content as always. Great tip by encouraging all architects to manage ADR for existing systems.

[@markrichards5014]

Thanks Babu!

[@markrichards5014]

Thanks Babu!

[@ren.oooooo]

The timing of this is just perfect, pure serendipity

[@markrichards5014]

Glad it helped!

[@sant4398]

Thanks for the lesson. Good point regarding starting to add ADRs for existing product to document answers for the question "Why?".

[@alexsharma]

Nice to know this use case for ADR. Thanks !!!

[@durgapalepu5780]

Thank you Sir, it's very informative and motivating session to manage ADRs for existing systems.

[@vishwas13485]

Thanks for info keep it up 🙂

[@SapuIQ]

Thanks Mark for this. Would you recommend any tools to capture and maintain ADR's in general ?

[@markrichards5014]

There are two that I'm aware of; github.com/npryce/adr-tools and the newer one, adr.github.io/. I've not used the latter one as yet, but have used the first one. In most cases I leverage either a wiki or a dedicated github repo rather than using these tools, but I recommend trying them out to see if they are a fit for you.

[@SteveLeve]

Agree with Mark's comment about using native Git or Wiki, keeping ADRs close to the code they cover is helpful to preserve scope & context. Having them under version control is also helpful to easily see the evolution of ideas over time. Markdown or text is a fine start, start small & adjust. The big win of adopting ADRs is that they provoke important conversations & help capture the discussion, knowledge, & decisions made so that information can be used to inform for future decisions. in most cases, having something written down is better than having nothing!

[@markrichards5014]

@@SteveLeve Well said!

[@mkohanek]

Any thoughts on how to manage ADRs for an enterprise in terms of centralized vs distributed storage? Should you have a centralized repo for an org at a company, where all ADRs are in one place (ie multiple related teams using one repo to save ADRs in one place)? Should you add ADRs to the same repos where the application itself lives, which keeps it close to code but the ADRs are distributed all over? Or a separate repo for a given team where all their ADRs belong, which keeps it consolidated for a team, but the other related teams across the org might have trouble finding them?

[@markrichards5014]

I prefer to have all of my ADRs in a single GIT repo, with a directory structure divided by specific applications, then enterprise decisions, then integration decisions.

[@brianbahati1553]

Thanks for the great lesson. Could ADRs go hand in hand while doing an architecture audit for an existing system?

[@markrichards5014]

YES! And what a great time to start challenging and qualifying the architectural things you find during the audit.

[@brianbahati1553]

@@markrichards5014 correct

[@SteveLeve]

It's an interesting use case, I never thought specifically of using ADRs for architectural archeology, but it could be a great way to capture consistently important details

[@stevenromero9962]

If you don’t mind me asking, what tool(s) do you use for architecture diagrams? Thank you for the great content.

[@markrichards5014]

I use Omnigraffle (I'm a mac user)