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ADS Architecture Description Standard

ADS: The Architecture Description Standard

ADSThe Architecture Description Standard

A free, open-source standard for writing clear, consistent architecture documents. Schema-driven. AI-ready. Adoptable today.

Quickstart Read the Standard Download Templates

For solution architects, enterprise architects, and architecture governance teams.

The Problem

Section titled “The Problem”

Architecture documentation is inconsistent. Every organisation, team, and architect produces Solution Architecture Documents in a different format — with gaps in security, no quality assessment, and no way to compare one design against another. There is no widely-adopted standard that tells architects exactly what to include, how to structure it, and what “good” looks like.

The Solution

Section titled “The Solution”

ADS defines exactly what sections, content, and quality criteria a Solution Architecture Document (SAD) shall contain. It is built upon practical experience and established frameworks including ISO 42010, the cloud Well-Architected Frameworks, TOGAF, and the 4+1 View Model.

Architectural Views

Views describing the solution from distinct stakeholder perspectives: Logical, Integration & Data Flow, Physical, Data, Security, and Scenarios.

Quality Attributes

Cross-cutting evaluation lenses — Operational Excellence, Reliability, Performance, Cost, and Sustainability — applied across all views.

Lifecycle & Governance

Development lifecycle, operational procedures, risk management, decision records, and compliance traceability.

AI and Machine-Ready

A formal JSON Schema with atomic fields. Designed for both AI-assisted authoring (generate first drafts from a brief) and programmatic analysis (parse, compare, audit, and report on SADs at portfolio scale).

Key features:

  • Schema-driven — JSON Schema enables validation, multi-format generation, AI-assisted authoring, and programmatic analysis
  • Documentation depths — every section is tagged SHALL / SHOULD / MAY (RFC 2119) for progressive adoption
  • Compliance scoring — 0–5 scale per section for governance review
  • Templates — ready-to-use in Markdown, YAML, and JSON — importable into LLMs, wikis, editors, or analysis tooling
  • Open — CC BY 4.0 — free to use, adapt, and redistribute

For a detailed comparison with other frameworks, see Why ADS? and Framework Alignment. The full structure of the standard is in the navigation on the left.