Manu's Vault

Email Driven Architecture Anti Pattern

3 min readStatus:Seedling

Core Idea

Email-Driven Architecture is an anti-pattern where architectural decisions are made through informal email threads, resulting in lost context, missing rationale, and undocumented decisions that cannot be traced or evaluated later.

Email-Driven Architecture Anti-Pattern

Definition: Email-Driven Architecture occurs when teams make significant architectural decisions through email conversations rather than formal documentation processes:

  • While email is a natural communication medium
  • It creates several critical problems when used as the primary mechanism for architectural decision-making

Fundamental Issue - Scattered Context:

  • Email threads scatter decision context across multiple messages
  • Makes it nearly impossible to reconstruct the complete rationale later
  • Example: A decision discussed across ten emails with various participants creates a fragmented record where:
    • Key points are buried in reply chains
    • Some stakeholders are CC’d partway through
    • The final consensus may never be explicitly stated
  • Result: When a new team member asks “why did we choose this approach?” six months later, no single source provides the answer

Lack of Essential Structure: Email fails to capture the essential elements of architectural decisions:

  • A proper Architecture Decision Record documents:
    • Context
    • Decision
    • Alternatives considered
    • Consequences
  • Email threads typically lack this structure:
    • The conversation may cover these points informally
    • But extracting them requires reading through entire threads and inferring conclusions
    • Important details about rejected alternatives and their tradeoffs often appear in passing comments rather than explicit analysis

Enables Other Anti-Patterns: This anti-pattern directly enables other decision-making failures:

  • Groundhog-Day-Anti-Pattern: When decisions exist only in email archives, teams re-debate the same choices because no one remembers they were already decided
  • Covering-Your-Assets-Anti-Pattern: Participants can later claim they opposed a decision or weren’t consulted, since email provides ambiguous evidence of who agreed to what

The Solution: Recognize email as appropriate for discussing architectural options but inadequate for recording architectural decisions:

  • Discussions can happen anywhere—email, Slack, meetings
  • But the final decision must be captured in a formal ADR that explicitly states:
    • What was decided
    • Why
    • What alternatives were considered

Why This Matters

Email-Driven Architecture creates institutional memory loss. When decisions are scattered across email threads, the organization cannot learn from its architectural choices or understand why the system evolved as it did. This forces new team members to rediscover context through archaeology rather than reading, and prevents systematic evaluation of whether decisions achieved their intended goals. Moving from email-driven to ADR-based decision-making transforms architecture from folklore into documented engineering practice.

Sources

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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