ADRsupervisor

ADRsupervisor is a software tool designed to manage Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) within software projects. It provides a centralized catalog, governance workflows, and tooling to create, review, and track architectural decisions throughout their lifecycle.

The system emphasizes traceability, linking each ADR to related code changes, tickets, and team discussions. It supports standard ADR formats, enforces lifecycle states, and helps teams maintain a historical record of why and how architectural choices were made.

Key features include a searchable central repository for ADRs, lifecycle management with states such as proposed, accepted, superseded, and archived, templates for new ADRs, tagging and impact analysis, dashboards and reports, and integrations with version control systems and issue trackers.

ADRsupervisor offers a REST API and a command-line interface, with a web-based UI for browsing, editing, and approving ADRs. It is designed to be deployed in containerized environments and supports multi-repo setups, access control, and notifications by email or chat systems.

In practice, teams introduce ADRs at design time to document decisions, then update or supersede them as projects evolve. ADRs are written in Markdown or plain text and can be generated or inferred from pull requests and commits in supported workflows.

The project originated as a community effort to improve architectural governance and knowledge sharing. It has been adopted by development teams seeking clearer decision histories and more disciplined change management, while remaining flexible enough for smaller projects.

See also Architecture Decision Records; ADR tools; software governance.