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Architecture principles governance

  • Owner: Architecture group
  • Applies to: Architecture governance and decision-making across products and teams
  • Enforcement: Architecture review, ADRs, CI (dependency direction and resource budget checks)
  • Related: EG-003, EG-008, EG-012, EG-010

Architectural Note: Guidelines are generic process standards. Actual architectural principles (e.g. AP-01 to AP-17) are defined per business, product line, or vertical market in Business Principles. This guideline governs how business principles are declared, cited, and enforced.

Purpose

Principles are the durable reasons behind architecture decisions. Guidelines define the generic governance framework; business verticals supply the domain-specific principles (e.g. automotive safety vs. cloud microservices).

This guideline establishes the mandatory rules for citing, reviewing, and enforcing business principles across engineering teams and AI agents.

Governance Rules

  1. PRN-01 ADRs and RFCs MUST cite the active business/vertical principle IDs (from the business principles the product adopts) that drove or constrained the decision.
  2. PRN-02 A decision that deviates from an established business principle MUST explicitly record the deviation in its ADR, including rationale and risk mitigation.
  3. PRN-03 Where principles conflict, the business unit’s precedence order applies unless an approved ADR defines a product-specific exception.
  4. PRN-04 Where a business principle can be checked automatically (dependency direction, resource budgets, schema compatibility), enforcement MUST be integrated into CI.
  5. PRN-05 Business principles MUST be reviewed annually by the business unit lead and modified only via an RFC.
  6. PRN-06 Products MAY tailor principle precedence using their quality attribute profile (EG-003).

Principle Enforcement Mechanics

Business Vertical Principles (e.g. AP-02 Layered Dependencies)
            │
            ▼
Generic Guideline Governance (EG-007 PRN-01 to PRN-06)
            │
            ▼
Automated Pipeline Enforcement (CI Check / Architecture Review / ADR)

Compliance

Rule Checked By
PRN-01, PRN-02 Architecture review & principles field in ADR template
PRN-04 Pipeline checks (dependency direction, memory/CPU budgets, contract compatibility)
PRN-05 Annual governance review date

Checklist

  • Active business principles are selected from Business Principles for the product (PRN-05)
  • ADRs and RFCs cite business principle IDs (PRN-01)
  • Deviations from business principles are recorded in ADRs with trade-off rationale (PRN-02)
  • Automated architecture rules (budgets, dependency direction) run in CI pipeline (PRN-04)

As Markdown. To copy it into an issue, a pull request or a review record:

- [ ] Active business principles are selected from [Business Principles](business-principles.md) for the product (PRN-05)
- [ ] ADRs and RFCs cite business principle IDs (PRN-01)
- [ ] Deviations from business principles are recorded in ADRs with trade-off rationale (PRN-02)
- [ ] Automated architecture rules (budgets, dependency direction) run in CI pipeline (PRN-04)