GADR: Gathering Architecture Decision Records from Meeting Transcriptions
Organizations: Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE) Recife, Brasil
Abstract
Existing LLM-based approaches to Architecture Decision Record (ADR) generation share a critical and largely unexamined assumption: that input is already reasonably structured. In practice, architectural decisions emerge from informal, noisy meetings where choices are implicit, fragmented, and entangled with off-topic dialogue, precisely the conditions under which single-pass prompting degrades. This paper presents GADR, a multi-agent, self-correcting workflow that extracts architectural decisions from raw meeting transcriptions and generates Nygard-formatted ADR drafts. A feasibility study comprising five real project meeting transcripts, expert review by four senior architects, and evaluation by fifteen students provides initial evidence that the agentic workflow captures most expert-identified decisions and produces drafts participants found clear and useful, outperforming zero-shot and few-shot baselines in stability and structural adherence. The study also addresses the underexplored trade-off of RAG-based enrichment improving ADR depth while simultaneously risking transcript-unfaithful content, raising open questions about traceability in automated architectural documentation that we believe is worth the community's attention.
Figures & tables
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Overlap | Merges decisions that represent the same architectural strategy. |
| Fragmentation | Detects decisions that are too small to justify a separate ADR. |
| Missing | Finds relevant choices or trade-offs omitted from extraction. |
| Noise | Removes procedural decisions without architectural impact. |
| Scope Duplicate | Removes items that only repeat broader decisions. |
| G | Team | Context | Decision Themes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6 Students | Online FPS game | Networking model, server authority, latency handling, event broker, object pooling |
| 2 | 7 Students | Urban mobility/logistics | Event-driven architecture, message broker, external-event simulation, integration facade |
| 3 | 7 Students | Smart gym platform | AWS/EKS deployment, autoscaling, brokers, Redis/BullMQ, offline synchronization |
| 4 | 4 Students | AI/multi-agent system | Layered architecture, hexagonal variant, event-driven trade-offs, future microservices |
| 5 | 4 Senior Researchers | Health R&D platform | Offline support, Gov.br authentication, RNDS integration, C4/ADR documentation |
| Data Source | N | Key Finding | Main Limitation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Comparative (Agentic vs. Zero/Few-shot) | 5 transcripts 3 rounds | Agentic RAG produced lower variance and richer ADRs; zero-shot was least stable | Verbosity increases review cost |
| Participant Forms | 15 respondents, 55 decision-level evaluations | 52/55 agreed with extracted decision; 51/55 found ADRs clear and complete | Students evaluated their own projects, introducing familiarity bias |
| Expert Evaluation | 4 evaluators, 23 reference decisions | Agent covered 18/23 expert-identified decisions | Agent occasionally treated tentative discussions as accepted decisions |