AL Trace
Trace decisions from need to outcome.
Make sense of the problem before choosing a solution. Give your team a shared record of the requirements, reasoning, approval, and evidence behind each architecture decision.
Walkthroughs use fictional examples. AL will confirm access options and requirements for your team.
A shared structure for the architecture conversation
Bring together managers, directors, engineers, architects, and service owners. Plain questions help everyone contribute; the ADR keeps the decision and its consequences reviewable.
Understand the problem
Describe who is affected, what is happening, and the evidence you have. Separate possible causes from facts and agree how success will be measured.
Review the decision
Map requirements to options and tradeoffs. Save the proposed choice as an architecture decision record, or ADR, with an owner and a review.
Follow the evidence
Preserve the accepted decision and link versioned artifacts, tests, and observations. Return to the intended outcome when new evidence arrives.
Keep the outcome in view after the design is approved
- Problem
- Residents cannot submit permits during an outage, and the operating team relies on manual recovery.
- Intended outcome
- Restore the service within two hours, with no more than 15 minutes of data loss. These are proposed targets.
- Requirement → ADR
- Compare backup restore, warm standby, and active-active designs. Record the selected approach, costs, dependencies, and accepted tradeoffs.
- Approval → evidence
- Approve the architecture direction, then link the recovery test plan. The test remains planned until results are recorded; design approval does not prove the recovery target.
Use it across architecture work
Business, infrastructure, solution, and service architecture share the same core questions. Optional Azure guidance adds workload boundaries, platform responsibilities, and validation prompts to the decision.
The workbench keeps accepted wording and approval history. When the decision changes materially, create a successor and preserve the earlier reasoning.
Bring the evidence into a bid
Link a reviewed ADR revision and its evidence from Bid Workbench. The bid assessment uses those references alongside the solicitation, pricing, and competitive assumptions.
Architecture Logic owns AL Trace as a separate product. Information about the earlier ADR Register remains available.
Bring a problem to the conversation
Walk through how a client need becomes a reviewable decision, then follow the evidence back to the outcome.
Request an AL Trace walkthrough