The client asks why we built it this way
Decisions are records with their reasons, and every change keeps who made it and why.
For: Product owner, Project lead
What happened
A client or an auditor asks why the system behaves the way it does, and nobody remembers.
Why it happens
Reasons live in heads and chats. By the time someone asks, they are gone.
What CorPole does
- Keeps decisions (ADRs) with their context and consequences, linked to what they govern.
- Keeps the solution's design (BDR, FDR, NFDR, TDR, ADR) as it is today; every version names the work, the requirements and the initiative that changed it.
- Traces the chain back to the ask: design version, work, initiative, and the demand that says who asked, how, when and what.
- Traces a requirement to its criteria, tests, work items and pull or merge requests.
- Keeps an append-only history: who changed what, when, and the reason for every Authority change, whether a person, an agent, GitHub, GitLab or CI.
What you do
- Open the design record for the behaviour in question: its versions show which work and initiative changed it.
- Follow the initiative to its demand, and the requirement to its decisions and relations.
- Open the change history for the period in question.
Keep it from happening again
- Ask agents to propose a decision whenever a design choice is made.