1. Use of RFCs and ADRs¶
Use of RFCs and ADRs¶
Status: Valid
Overview¶
Styx as a project needs a uniform way to record past or current decision making, and a way to propose new decisions to be made.
Context¶
Current decisions are not really documented anywhere and it requires effort
from current developers to help get new developers up to speed or find “the
right way to do things”. While there is pretty extensive API documentation,
and there are some docs that show examples of how to perform some high level
actions using the styx library, that is not enough.
Having a method to record the past actions and the decision making that went into them is vital to understanding how the project got to where it currently is and what other options were considered, prototyped, or omitted in the search for a solution to a problem.
As it currently stands, the internal development team makes decisions and regularly plans new features – from the outside without any far off goal or objective. What does this current feature just merged have to do with a goal? And what is the next goal? Currently only the current tasking and the soon-to-be tasking are updated with any form of labels, and due to the small size of the team that is unlikely to change.
Decision¶
To accommodate the current size, state, and abilities of the team (and the interests!), both an RFC and an ADR process are going to be added. This will separate the concerns of the RFCs and ADRs to allow ADRs to only focus on the decision that have been made (whether back-filled or live), and allow for the RFCs to focus on the propositions of new decisions to be made. As a part of the RFC acceptance or rejection a new ADR is created to reflect the actions taken.
The structure and guidelines for ADRs will be defined in Architecture Decision Records (ADR’s), and RFCs will be defined in the ‘RFCs repository <https://github.com/styx-emulator/rfcs>’_
Selfishly, this will hopefully keep more focus of the actual decision and the reasoning behind it documented in the ADR, and leave any niche technical details and planning, architecture design and iteration tucked into RFCs documents.
I full expect this to change in the future.