Core Concepts

A handful of ideas underpin everything in ArchForge. Learn these four and the rest of the product follows naturally.

Artifacts

An artifact is any single document of record — an ADR, a reference architecture, a standard, an RFC, a principle, a playbook, a technology component. Every artifact has a stable, org-prefixed reference id (for example ACME-ADR-014) so it can be cited from anywhere.

Types

Each artifact has a type. Types are configured per organization: an admin can enable, disable, and customize the types available in a workspace. The type determines which fields an artifact has, which template it starts from, and how it appears in the sidebar.

Links

Artifacts can be linked to one another — an ADR supersedes an earlier ADR, a reference architecture implements a standard, an RFC resulted in a decision. Links accumulate into a knowledge graph you can traverse to understand how decisions, standards, and designs relate.

The review lifecycle

Most artifact types move through a lifecycle with explicit states and transitions, for example:

Lifecycle states make it clear what is authoritative (Published) versus in-progress (Draft, Proposed) versus historical (Deprecated, Superseded). Reviewers act on artifacts in review, and notifications keep the right people informed.

Ready to put this together? See Writing an ADR.