This ADR template emphasizes creating a business case for a decision, including critera, candidates, and costs.
Title:
Status:
Evaluation criteria:
Summary: explain briefly what we seek to discover and why.
Specifics
Candidates to consider:
Summary: explain briefly how we discovered candidates, and draw attention to any outliers.
List all candidates and related options; what are we evaluating as potential solutions?
Specifics
Research and analysis of each candidate:
Summary: explain briefly the research methods, and draw attention to patterns, clusters, and outliers.
Does/doesn’t meet criteria and why
Summary
Specifics
Cost analysis
Summary
Examples
Licensing, such as contract agreements and legal commitments
Training, such as upskilling and change management
Operating, such as support and maintenance
Metering, such as bandwidth and CPU usage
SWOT analysis
Summary
Strengths
Weaknesses
Opportunites
Threats
Internal opinions and feedback
Summary
Examples
By the team, ideally written by the actual person
From other stakeholders
Quality attributes a.k.a. cross-functional requirements
External opinions and feedback
Summary
Who is providing the opinion?
What are other candidates you considered?
What are you creating?
Examples
B2B or B2C
external-facing or employee-only
desktop or mobile
pilot or production
monolith or microservices
How did you evaluate the candidates?
Why did you choose the winner?
What is happening since then?
Examples
How is the winner performing?
What % of real-world production user traffic is flowing through the winner?
What kinds of integrations are involved, such as with continuous delivery pipelines, content management systems, analytics and metrics, etc.?
Knowing what you know now, what would you advise people to do differently?
Anecdotes
Recommendation:
Summary
Specifics