ADR-Light Coverage
governance
systemic
This metric measures the percentage of significant architecture and data decisions that are documented using ADR-Light, a lightweight and structured decision record format. A high coverage improves traceability, strengthens team alignment, and supports sustainable architectural evolution by ensuring that critical decisions are explicit, reviewable, and transparent over time.
ADR-Light captures the context, reasoning, alternatives, and expected impact of a decision, helping teams understand trade-offs and maintain long-term system health. By documenting decisions clearly, teams reduce architectural drift, avoid knowledge silos, and ensure continuity in decision-making. This supports sustainable system evolution and aligns with Green Agile principles such as Value Focus, Lean, Flow, Transparency, and Systems Thinking.
- Category: Architecture & Infrastructure
- Measurement Frequency: per iteration
- Responsibility: Engineering Team (primary), Product Lead (strategic alignment), Green Agile Coach (enablement)
Impact
This metric improves architectural sustainability by ensuring that important decisions are not implicit but explicitly documented. It supports long-term maintainability, reduces rework, prevents architectural drift, and creates organizational clarity. By capturing reasoning and trade-offs, it helps teams make more deliberate architecture choices aligned with ecological, economic, and social sustainability goals.
Calculation
\[\frac{\text{Decisions documented with ADR-Light}}{\text{All significant architecture or data decisions}} \times 100\]The metric is calculated by dividing the number of significant architectural or data decisions documented using ADR-Light by the total number of such decisions within the iteration. The result is multiplied by 100 to represent the coverage as a percentage. Teams should aim for ≥ 80% coverage, ensuring that most important decisions are captured while allowing flexibility where documentation adds limited value.
Example
During an iteration, the engineering team makes a total of 10 significant architectural or data decisions — for example, selecting a caching strategy, defining service boundaries, choosing an indexing approach, or setting data retention rules. Out of these 10 decisions, 8 are documented using ADR-Light.
Using the formula:
\[\frac{8}{10} \times 100 = 80\%\]The ADR-Light Coverage for this iteration is 80%, which meets the recommended target. This demonstrates that most important decisions are explicit, reviewable, and transparent, while still allowing flexibility for low-impact decisions that do not require formal documentation.