Decision record templet fo business case

Dis ADR templet dey emphasize to create business case for decision, including criteria, candidates, and costs.

Top-level

• Title
• Status
• Evaluation criteria
• Candidates to consider
• Research and analysis of each candidate
  • Does/doesn't meet criteria and why
  • Cost analysis
  • SWOT analysis
  • Opinions and feedback
• Recommendation

Low-level deep dive

Title:

• Short present tense imperative phrase, less than 50 characters, like git commit message.

Status:

• One of proposed, accepted, rejected, deprecated, superseded, etc.

Evaluation criteria:

• Summary: explain briefly wetin we wan discover and why.

• Specifics

Candidates to consider:

• Summary: explain briefly how we discover di candidates, and draw attention to any outliers.

• List all candidates and related options; wetin we dey evaluate as potential solutions?

• Specifics

Research and analysis of each candidate:

• Summary: explain briefly di research methods, and draw attention to patterns, clusters, and outliers.

• Does/doesn't meet criteria and why

  • Summary

  • Specifics

• Cost analysis

  • Summary

  • Examples

    • Licensing, like contract agreements and legal commitments

    • Training, like upskilling and change management

    • Operating, like support and maintenance

    • Metering, like bandwidth and CPU usage

• SWOT analysis

  • Summary

  • Strengths

  • Weaknesses

  • Opportunities

  • Threats

• Internal opinions and feedback

  • Summary

  • Examples

    • By di team, ideally write by di actual person

    • From other stakeholders

    • Quality attributes a.k.a. cross-functional requirements

• External opinions and feedback

  • Summary

  • Who dey provide di opinion?

  • Which other candidates you consider?

  • Wetin you dey create?

    • Examples

      • B2B or B2C

      • external-facing or employee-only

      • desktop or mobile

      • pilot or production

      • monolith or microservices

  • How you evaluate di candidates?

  • Why you choose di winner?

  • Wetin dey happen since then?

    • Examples

      • How di winner dey perform?

      • Wetin % of real-world production user traffic dey flow through di winner?

      • Which kinds of integrations dey involved, like with continuous delivery pipelines, content management systems, analytics and metrics, etc.?

      • Since you know wetin you know now, wetin you go advise people to do different?

• Anecdotes

Recommendation:

• Summary

• Specifics