How an ADR saved the day!

One of the principles we adhere to at my current company, is to write down Architectural Decision Records whenever we make a "larger decision". Recently, having such a record, came in super handy, as we were trying to resolve a licensing issue wherein our library was called from a .NET Core application through a .NET Framework, using a custom communication protocol. It was all very ... convoluted and - more importantly - didn't do what it was supposed to.

The fact that no-one from the original team was still with us, didn't make things easier! After tearing our hairs out for quite a while, one of the team members offhandedly asked "shouldn't there be an ADR for this?", prompting us to look into the shared repository. There was! And right in it, it said:

Once *************.Client starts supporting .NET Standard consumers, we can remove this workaround and fetch the license status from ******** directly.

Much easier! Now we could remove a lot of very intricate code (which admittedly made sense and had value at the time it was written), get to the root of the actual issue and resolve it quickly.

Consider writing ADRs and share them within your organization so that future teams can get an on-demand insight in how and why previous decisions were made!

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