Work Product Descriptor (Artifact): Architectural Decisions Summary

The Architectural Decisions Summary artifact contains summaries of Architectural Decisions (AD) that are relevant to the enterprise IT architecture, domain IT architecture, or other level of IT architecture. ADs are documented to:

Provide a single place to find important architectural decisions and to avoid unnecessary reconsideration of the same issues;
Make explicit the rationale and justification of architectural decisions and IT architectures;
Alternatives are documented, including reasons why they were dismissed;
Ensure the architecture is extensible and can support an evolving system;
Provide a reference of documented decisions for new people who join the team;
Any decision involving IT hardware and software is included.

Main Description

Architecture Decisions Repository

The architectural decisions (AD) repository contains all IT decisions that apply to the enterprise (or to business domains, units, projects), the "mandatory use of IPV6" for example. Each AD contains the background and substantiating information that was used to make the decision. Users of the repository are generally not interested in the background and substantiation, just the decision itself and therefore this "Summary Report" has been defined.

The enterprise or business line that owns the Architectural Decisions (AD) will need to decide how they are to be classified and organized for easy retrieval by the architects. Although the creation and storage of Architecture Decisions is currently outside the scope of UAM, one suggestion is that they be organized in a widely available searchable repository on the corporate Intranet. This will facilitate their distribution and use by all architects, project managers and implementers within the organization. This will in turn promote easy compliance to enterprise and business domain standards and IT architectures with all the benefits that follow.

Summary Contents

The repository will ideally allow a user to search for ADs that are relevant and important for he architecture effort at hand. This artifact extracts the decision portion of all ADs that have been found relevant to the effort in question, thus providing a useful summary reference for the project.

The rough contents of an Architecture Decision Summary are the title, reference number, date and description of the decision. See the Template: Architectural Decisions Summary Template definition for more detail.

Also of use is the contents and structure of an Architectural Decision. See: Artifact: Architectural Decision and Template: Architectural Decision Template.

Brief Outline

The Architectural Decision Summary document has just one repeated part for each included AD. The following is extracted from each AD (also see: Template: Architectural Decisions Summary Template):

<Architectural Decision Title>

Reference: <reference number> <date>

This is a direct extract of the "Solution Architecture" sub-section in the defined AD.

Optionally the following section of the architectural decision may be included for each AD in the summary:

Impacts and Implications

This is a direct extract of the section of the same name in the defined AD. It documents any implications of the decision, such as technology choice, cost, and support implications. It also documents and cross-references any implications on other ADs, past or present.