The Three Types of Architecture Decisions

The Architecture Decision Record has become a staple of modern architecture practice, but most teams treat all decisions the same way — and pay for it later in rework, confusion, and decisions that quietly rot. This talk makes the case that architecturally significant decisions fall into at least three distinct categories — structural decisions that shape the system's fundamental form, cross-cutting decisions that enforce constraints across components, and local decisions that make sense only in narrow context — each requiring different levels of rigour, different audiences, and different lifecycle management. Grounded in the BTABoK's Decisions concept, which frames decision-making as a core architecture artefact rather than a byproduct of design, the session gives practitioners a practical classification model they can apply immediately.