Design Documents

Design documents describe the decisions and tradeoffs you’ve made in specific projects. They are like Architecture Decision Records, but the stakeholder reach is broader and only sometimes technical.

Write design documents for any project whose capabilities will be used by many future projects. Write design documents for projects that impact your users. Write a design document for any work that takes more than a full sprint of engineering time to complete.

Good design documents describe specific problems. Explore possible solutions and explain the selected approach in detail. It’s better to write a good paper and get it in front of others than delay for something better. Design documents act as the backbone of an Engineering organization’s Technical Strategy. Thus reducing the decision fatigue that every new project brings to software engineering teams.