Documenting Engineering Decisions
Record what was decided, what was rejected, and what would change your mind - without ADR theatre.
Engineering decisions compound. Choosing a queue, a data model, or a service boundary shapes years of work. Teams usually record the outcome and lose the reasoning.
A lightweight decision record
Five things worth writing down
- 1
The decision in one sentence
"We will keep billing calculations in the monolith until the ledger extract is complete."
- 2
The context that forced the choice
Traffic, compliance, team capacity, existing incidents - whatever made other options worse.
- 3
Alternatives considered
Name what you rejected. This stops the same debate from restarting every quarter.
- 4
Assumptions and revisit triggers
What must remain true? What signal would reopen the decision?
- 5
Owner
Someone accountable for the decision remaining coherent as the system evolves.
Before you close the thread
- ✓ The decision is findable from the relevant service or initiative
- ✓ Alternatives are named
- ✓ Constraints are explicit
- ✓ Someone owns follow-up if assumptions break
Keep decisions connected to systems
Prodigent links engineering decisions to the services, incidents, and people they affect.
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