Design It!

Explain the Rationale for Your Decisions

Design rationale describes why we made each design decision. Maybe you chose a pattern to promote a certain quality attribute. Maybe you picked a technology the team is familiar with or one that had the right cost. Every decision had alternatives, pros, and cons. We weighed trade-offs among properties and justified our conclusions through some logical thought process.

The better downstream designers understand the rationale for your decisions, the better they can embrace the intent of your design. The better others understand the intent behind your decisions, the more likely they will be to uphold the architectural integrity of the system as it evolves.

Rationale in an architecture description comes ...