[tootie]

I honestly don't think it's even valuable to write them. It's a manifestation of BDUF. The more detail you put into a document up front, the more wrong assumptions you're committee to paper. It's basically a guess. Same reason we've adopted agile as a mindset, architecture needs to be agile too. Documenting a system as it's built is much more useful.

For context, I mostly work in consulting. So I don't have a lot of authority to impact culture as much as I try. Doing handoffs is a big part of my job and even if I hand off a detailed explanation of everything we've done, I'm still guaranteed to get asked about everything I've already written down.

[edraferi]

I'd much rather have a clear record of the assumptions made & rational for them than have to discover them later when problems crop up.

[tootie]

Agree this is probably the most beneficial application. You can reference it almost like a contract.