Comparison
Architectural significancevsArchitecture decision record
Architectural significance
someone asked whether this needed a written decision, and the answer was whether it would be expensive to change later.
The test for which decisions deserve process. A decision is architecturally significant if reversing it later would be costly — it crosses team boundaries, affects a public interface, shapes the data model, or picks a technology the organisation will have to operate. Everything else should be made by whoever is doing the work, and the failure to draw this line is why some teams write documents for library choices and none for the schema.
Full entry →Architecture decision record
you asked why the queue was chosen and someone found a one-page file in the repository from 2023.
A short document recording one decision: the context, the options, what was chosen and what it costs. It lives with the code, is numbered, and is never edited after acceptance — a later decision supersedes it rather than rewriting history. Its value is entirely in the future: it is what stops a new team from either blindly keeping a constraint that expired or cheerfully re-making a mistake somebody already paid for.
Full entry →