Living Documentation: Continuous Knowledge Sharing by Design, First Edition

Chapter 12

Living Architecture Documentation

Architecture can be defined in many ways: “Architecture is what everybody in the project should know” or “Architecture is what is important, whatever that is” or “Architecture is about the decisions that are hard to change later.” What is implied in all these definitions is that architecture involves exchanging knowledge about some decisions between multiple people over time. These decisions are not isolated events but are decisions in the context at the time.

So documentation is a significant part of architecture. A number of documentation approaches have been proposed, and there are many books on this topic. This chapter focuses on how living documentation can help with architecture, especially ...