From Architectural Decisions to Design Decisions

If architectural decision records are so useful to capture software design rationale, why not extend their scope? This is Part 1 of a two-part story; Part 2 goes from software design decision to strategic ones and any decision.

Examples are the selection of programming languages and tools, of architectural patterns, of integration technologies and of middleware assets. An earlier story identifies some more core decisions. Note that those already go into organizational matters, for instance by asking “What governance structure should be in place for a product?”. This indicates that there is no hard line between architecture design and other decisions.

What makes an issue architecturally significant? By intent, all three AD definitions above are somewhat fuzzy; hence, I developed an architectural significance test. This test (elaborated upon in the previous story too) uses seven criteria to assess significance quickly:

I follow Grady Booch in that all architecture is design but not all design is architecture. The seven criteria in the architectural significance test express this is-a relation. So let’s try to find the boundary.

We could argue that a cumbersome layout of the change log degrades usability and maintainability, so it is architectural (but to a lesser extend than the query syntax issue).

Are file naming conventions architecturally significant? Hopefully not (but who knows)? Either way, the decision record above still reads well and captures valuable information. So we can conclude:

Can we take another step now, from design to information technology in general (or even further)? Part 2 investigates.

I hope you liked this part of the story. If so, please consider to clap for it.

© Olaf Zimmermann, 2021. All rights reserved.

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