Philippe Kruchten
Software architecture — decision documentation and views & beyond
Software engineering professor and architect; long advocated recording architecture decisions, not only views — predecessor context for ADRs.
Philippe Kruchten is a software engineering professor (UBC), architect, and author best known for the 4+1 view model of software architecture. Long before the ADR label spread, he argued that architecture documentation must capture decisions and their rationale — not only structure diagrams — a line of work continued in Documenting Software Architectures (with Felix Bachmann, Len Bass, and others).
What we cite
- Decision registers / decision logs as first-class architecture documentation — context for Michael Nygard’s 2011 ADR post, which explicitly thanks Kruchten for discussing “the importance of architecture decisions.”
- Not as coiner of “ADR” — Nygard coined the term and popularised the specific lightweight in-repo format.
Corpus stance
Context A2 — intellectual predecessor for decision-focused documentation; industry ADR lineage runs Kruchten (decision emphasis) → Nygard (2011 ADR template) → community variants (adr.github.io).