Decision Documentation Platform

Part of the worlds-biggest-software-project initiative.

An AI-native, open-source platform for capturing architectural and business decisions, their rationale, and the alternatives considered — and surfacing them at the moment they matter.

The Decision Documentation Platform is a structured home for Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and broader business decisions, built for engineering and product teams who outgrow Markdown-in-a-repo but cannot justify enterprise EA suites. It solves the persistent gap between teams that capture decisions and teams that can actually find and apply those decisions later.

Why Decision Documentation Platform?

Enterprise EA tools price out the mid-market. SAP LeanIX and Ardoq carry custom enterprise pricing well above $30/user/month, leaving a clear gap for an SMB/mid-market product in the $8–$20/user/month range.
Open-source ADR tooling stops at file storage. adr-tools, Log4Brains, and arc42 give teams a template and a CLI but offer no semantic search, no relationship mapping, and no governance.
Confluence and Notion treat ADRs as freeform pages. Neither enforces a structured ADR schema, validates fields, or supports decision-specific discovery.
Capture is no longer the hard problem — retrieval is. Research shows organisations write ADRs but cannot surface them when a related new decision is being made, an unsolved gap across every incumbent.
Business decisions have no equivalent of the ADR ecosystem. Build-vs-buy, vendor selection, and roadmap choices lack any structured documentation platform comparable to what technical ADRs enjoy.

Key Features

Structured Decision Capture

Structured ADR templates covering Context, Decision, Status, Consequences, and Rationale
MADR variant support with explicit Options, Pros/Cons, and Decision Outcome fields
Multiple template variants (Nygard, MADR, Y-Statements, custom)
Automatic decision ID generation (ADR-001, ADR-002) with organisational customisation
Shareable stable links for long-term traceability

Lifecycle, Collaboration & Governance

Decision status lifecycle: Proposed, Accepted, Superseded, Deprecated
Version history and audit trail of who changed what and when
Team collaboration with comments, mentions, and inline discussion
Access control and team permissions
Optional governance and approval workflows for formal reviews

Discovery & Relationships

Full-text search and filtering by status, author, date, tag, or linked component
Decision relationship mapping (depends-on, superseded-by)
Decision comparison view and history timeline
Tags and categories for organisation
Decision graph visualisation of dependencies and supersession chains

Integrations & Delivery

Jira integration: view linked issues and create decisions from tickets
Slack integration for decision notifications
GitHub / GitLab integration to read and write ADRs directly to repositories
Import from existing ADR repositories (GitHub, Log4Brains, Confluence)
Export to PDF and Markdown
REST API for custom integrations
Mobile-responsive interface

Business Decision Support

First-class support for non-technical decisions (build vs. buy, vendor selection, roadmap choices)
Simplified views for non-technical stakeholders alongside developer-centric workflows

AI-Native Advantage

The platform is designed around the gap incumbents leave open: not capturing decisions, but applying them. AI proactively retrieves relevant past ADRs at the moment a developer or architect is working on a related problem, drafts structured ADRs from Jira tickets, pull requests, or Slack discussions for human review, and checks proposed decisions against the existing corpus to flag contradictions and superseded assumptions. An onboarding chatbot answers "why was X built this way?" by synthesising relevant ADR history, compressing the weeks new engineers typically spend rebuilding architectural context.

Tech Stack & Deployment

The platform targets both managed SaaS and self-hosted deployment, aligning with established decision documentation standards: the original Nygard ADR format, MADR, arc42 §9, the C4 model for complementary diagramming, and ISO/IEC 42010 for architecture description. Storage interoperates with file-based ADR repositories (GitHub, GitLab, Log4Brains) so teams can adopt without abandoning existing Markdown corpora. Integrations with Jira, Slack, and GitHub/GitLab use public APIs, and a REST API exposes decisions to custom workflows and AI assistants consuming machine-readable decision context.

Market Context

There is no analyst-tracked category for "decision documentation platforms"; the adjacent enterprise architecture software market was valued at approximately $1.7 billion in 2024 with roughly 8% CAGR. Incumbents split sharply between free open-source tooling (adr-tools, Log4Brains, arc42) and enterprise SaaS (SAP LeanIX, acquired by SAP in 2023 for a reported €1.2 billion; Ardoq, $66M Series C in 2022) priced from $30 to $80+/user/month. Primary buyers are principal and staff engineers, CTOs and VPs of Engineering, enterprise architects, and product managers documenting strategic decisions.

Project Status

This project is in the research and specification phase.
Contributions, feedback, and domain expertise are welcome.

Contributing

We welcome contributions from developers, domain experts, and potential users. See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines.

Important: All contributions must be your own original work or clearly attributed open-source material with a compatible licence. Copyright infringement and licence violations will not be tolerated and will result in immediate removal of the offending contribution. If you are unsure whether a piece of code, text, or other material is safe to contribute, open an issue and ask before submitting.

Licence

Licence to be determined. See discussion for context.