adr

Enforcing architecture decision records in CI/CD pipelines involves validating pull requests against existing decisions and triggering a new ADR when changes introduce major design trade-offs. This prevents architectural drift by ensuring compliance checks fail on undocumented modifications.

Documenting architectural trade-offs requires creating comprehensive Architecture Decision Records that capture context, constraints, alternatives considered and rejected, consequences, and implementation verification guidance. This ensures future developers understand the reasoning behind long-term system design choices.

Discovering undocumented architectural choices in a firmware codebase is done through a systematic initial ADR discovery scan. This process identifies existing design decisions and automatically documents them as Accepted Architecture Decision Records to establish a baseline governance history.

Modifying an accepted architecture decision record violates ADR governance principles which promote immutable history. Instead of editing accepted records, you must create a new ADR that explicitly supersedes the previous one, documenting the new constraints and updated trade-offs.

You need to create a new architecture decision record for refactoring proposals when changes involve major design modifications or cross-component decisions where long-term trade-offs matter. This ensures the architectural impact is analyzed, documented, and aligned with the existing system design.