What is a decision record?
A decision record is a durable document of a single decision: the question, the outcome, who was involved and where each person stood, and the reasoning. Unlike meeting minutes, it is indexed by the question rather than by the event where the decision happened.
What does a decision record contain?
The question being decided, the decision in one unhedged sentence, the date, the participants with their explicit positions (support, opposition, or abstention), the reasoning, and the options that were rejected. Recording rejected options matters: alternatives that stay written down stay rejected, while unrecorded ones get re-proposed later as new ideas.
How do decision records relate to ADRs?
An architecture decision record (ADR) is the software-engineering species of the same genus: a short file, usually in the code repository, recording one technical decision and its context. The decision record generalizes the ADR idea to every kind of team decision, including vendor choices, policy changes, and roadmap calls, and adds explicit stakeholder positions, which ADRs typically omit.
Why not just keep decisions in meeting minutes?
Minutes are organized by meeting and by time, so finding a decision requires remembering when it was made. They also record discussion rather than positions, and a growing share of decisions conclude in chat threads with no meeting at all. A decision record lives in its own archive, indexed by the question, which is how people actually look for it months later.
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