Tool Support for Architectural Decisions

Abstract

In contrast to software architecture models, architectural decisions are often not explicitly documented, and therefore eventually lost. This contributes to major problems such as high-cost system evolution, stakeholders mis-communication, and limited reusability of core system assets. An approach is outlined that systematically and semi-automatically documents architectural decisions and allows them to be effectively shared by the stakeholders. A first attempt is presented that partially implements the approach by binding architectural decisions, models and the system implementation. The approach is demonstrated with an example demonstrating its usefulness with regards to some industrial use cases.