Create Conventions & Rationale documentation from the Decisions one

[xlamorlette-datadog]

Description

Create a 'Conventions & Rationale' documentation from the old 'Decisions' one.

Solve the questions that were in this old 'Decisions' documentation, leading to some little updates in the 'Design' documentation and in the comments in the code.

Motivation

Get an up to date technical documentation, to ensure smoothness of maintenance and future evolutions.

Additional Notes

Jira ticket: IDMPL-549 C++ Tracer: update and improve architecture documentation

[pr-commenter]

Benchmarks

Benchmark execution time: 2026-07-06 14:02:18

Comparing candidate commit 55fff78 in PR branch xlamorlette/documentation-conventions with baseline commit 2536f5e in branch main.

Found 0 performance improvements and 0 performance regressions! Performance is the same for 8 metrics, 0 unstable metrics.

Explanation

This is an A/B test comparing a candidate commit's performance against that of a baseline commit. Performance changes are noted in the tables below as:

• 🟩 = significantly better candidate vs. baseline
• 🟥 = significantly worse candidate vs. baseline

We compute a confidence interval (CI) over the relative difference of means between metrics from the candidate and baseline commits, considering the baseline as the reference.

If the CI is entirely outside the configured SIGNIFICANT_IMPACT_THRESHOLD (or the deprecated UNCONFIDENCE_THRESHOLD), the change is considered significant.

Feel free to reach out to #apm-benchmarking-platform on Slack if you have any questions.

More details about the CI and significant changes

You can imagine this CI as a range of values that is likely to contain the true difference of means between the candidate and baseline commits.

CIs of the difference of means are often centered around 0%, because often changes are not that big:

---------------------------------(------|---^--------)-------------------------------->
                              -0.6%    0%  0.3%     +1.2%
                                 |          |        |
         lower bound of the CI --'          |        |
sample mean (center of the CI) -------------'        |
         upper bound of the CI ----------------------'

As described above, a change is considered significant if the CI is entirely outside the configured SIGNIFICANT_IMPACT_THRESHOLD (or the deprecated UNCONFIDENCE_THRESHOLD).

For instance, for an execution time metric, this confidence interval indicates a significantly worse performance:

----------------------------------------|---------|---(---------^---------)---------->
                                       0%        1%  1.3%      2.2%      3.1%
                                                  |   |         |         |
       significant impact threshold --------------'   |         |         |
                      lower bound of CI --------------'         |         |
       sample mean (center of the CI) --------------------------'         |
                      upper bound of CI ----------------------------------'