Architecture Decision Recorder

Architecture Decision Recorder

Purpose

Create and maintain ADRs with context, decision, alternatives, risks, security impact, compliance relation, and review points. Treat regulatory, security, and operational references as review and evidence guidance, not legal advice.

When to use

• architecture decision records decisions, controls, or operating practices need independent review.
• A change affects architecture decision records artifacts such as ADR, decision context, alternative analysis, risk section, security impact, review date.
• The user needs evidence-oriented findings for risks such as undocumented decision, missing alternative, unowned risk, security impact omission, compliance ambiguity, stale review point.
• Audit, security, operations, or platform stakeholders need a concise readiness position.
• Existing documentation, tickets, tests, or logs must be turned into actionable remediation items.

Operating model

1. Identify the relevant architecture decision records artifacts, owners, systems, environments, and review boundary.
2. Compare the available artifacts against expected signals such as decision owner, status marker, linked issue, architecture diagram, control reference, review trigger.
3. Separate confirmed gaps from assumptions, missing evidence, and advisory improvement opportunities.
4. Rate findings by operational, security, compliance, customer, and auditability impact.
5. Recommend minimal remediation steps, validation evidence, owners, and review cadence.

Spec-Driven Change Context

• Treat repository specs, ADRs, runbooks, change proposals, design notes, and task files as durable context that outlives a chat session.
• For non-trivial changes, prefer a checked-in change artifact or equivalent proposal/design/tasks record before implementation begins.
• Capture requirement deltas explicitly: added, modified, removed, deprecated, or unchanged behavior.
• Keep implementation tasks traceable to acceptance criteria, affected specs, validation commands, and owners.
• During verification, compare the implementation against the proposal, design decisions, task checklist, and spec deltas.
• After completion, sync or archive completed change artifacts so the repository's source of truth reflects the final behavior.
• If the repository has no spec workflow yet, report the missing artifact and provide a minimal proposal/spec/tasks outline instead of relying on chat-only intent.

Skill-Specific Review Scope

• Primary artifacts: ADR, decision context, alternative analysis, risk section, security impact, review date.
• Risk themes: undocumented decision, missing alternative, unowned risk, security impact omission, compliance ambiguity, stale review point.
• Evidence signals: decision owner, status marker, linked issue, architecture diagram, control reference, review trigger.
• Ownership, approvals, review cadence, exception handling, and residual-risk decisions.
• Traceability from requirement or control intent to implementation, validation, and retained evidence.

Skill-Specific Checklist

• Confirm the review boundary covers the right architecture decision records systems, teams, and environments.
• Inventory and inspect the current ADR.
• Check whether decision context is current, approved, versioned, and owned.
• Verify that alternative analysis has test, ticket, log, or approval support.
• Look for undocumented decision and record concrete repository or process evidence.
• Look for missing alternative and identify affected assets, services, or stakeholders.
• Look for unowned risk and classify the operational or audit impact.
• Use decision owner to validate that the control or practice is operating.
• Use status marker to confirm ownership, timing, and reproducibility.
• Check exception, risk-acceptance, and expiry handling for architecture decision records.
• Confirm remediation items have owners, due dates, validation steps, and evidence expectations.
• Identify missing artifacts separately from weak artifacts so the next action is unambiguous.
• Review whether logging, reporting, or retained evidence exposes sensitive data unnecessarily.

Decision Rules

• If ADR is missing for a critical service, raise at least a high-severity readiness gap.
• If status marker cannot be tied to an owner and approval, treat the outcome as unauditable until corrected.
• If risk section is present but expired or untested, require validation before accepting residual risk.
• If the only support is verbal or chat-only context, request durable ticket, document, log, or test evidence.
• If remediation would require a process or architecture decision, assign a decision owner instead of prescribing legal conclusions.
• If compensating measures reduce likelihood but not impact, keep the residual-risk statement explicit.

Finding Categories

• Missing or stale architecture decision records artifact.
• Unclear ownership, approval, review cadence, or accountability.
• Insufficient validation, test proof, logs, ticket trail, or retained audit material.
• Unreviewed exception, residual risk, expiry, or compensating measure.
• Policy, architecture, operational, or platform implementation drift.
• Sensitive-data exposure in logs, reports, prompts, artifacts, or evidence packages.

Severity Guidance

• Critical: a gap in architecture decision records creates immediate outage, data-loss, privilege, regulatory-reporting, or irreversible business risk.
• High: ADR is missing, unowned, untested, or unauditable for a critical service or material change.
• Medium: decision context exists but is stale, incomplete, inconsistently enforced, or weakly evidenced.
• Low: wording, metadata, formatting, link freshness, or minor traceability improvements are needed.

DevSecOps Guardrails

• Do not read secrets, .env files, private keys, production credentials, masked CI/CD variables, database dumps, or sensitive logs unless explicitly required.
• Do not push, deploy, publish, merge, or create releases unless explicitly asked.
• Prefer merge requests, reviewable diffs, and auditable validation evidence.
• Prefer least privilege, minimal changes, and explicit rollback notes.
• Do not fabricate test results, repository state, commands, security findings, or validation outcomes.
• Report assumptions, uncertainty, residual risk, and validation gaps clearly.

Output Requirements

• Findings ordered by severity with affected architecture decision records artifacts and evidence references.
• Coverage note for reviewed artifacts: ADR, decision context, alternative analysis, risk section, security impact, review date.
• Risk note covering relevant themes: undocumented decision, missing alternative, unowned risk, security impact omission, compliance ambiguity, stale review point.
• Evidence request list using expected signals: decision owner, status marker, linked issue, architecture diagram, control reference, review trigger.
• Deliverables or updates needed: ADR draft or update, decision gap list, alternative trade-off summary, security and compliance note, review schedule.
• Residual-risk, assumptions, missing-context, and validation-gap summary.

Acceptance Criteria

• Relevant architecture decision records artifacts are identified, current, owned, and versioned where applicable.
• Each high-impact finding includes evidence, impact, likelihood, owner, and remediation guidance.
• Missing evidence is separated from failed controls or weak implementation.
• Exceptions and risk acceptances include owner, rationale, expiry, and compensating measures.
• Recommendations are review-oriented and avoid presenting regulatory interpretation as legal advice.
• Final output states pass, conditional pass, or blocked readiness with validation gaps.

Anti-Patterns

• Treating a policy title or control name as proof that the practice operates effectively.
• Collapsing missing evidence and failed implementation into one vague finding.
• Accepting open-ended exceptions without owner, expiry, impact, likelihood, and compensating measures.
• Making legal, regulatory, or audit conclusions beyond the available evidence and review scope.
• Recommending broad process rewrites when a targeted owner, test, ticket, or evidence fix is enough.
• Copying sensitive production data into examples, evidence packages, prompts, or reports.

Changelog

1.0.0 - 2026-07-28

• Initial generated production-ready SDLC / DevSecOps skill.