ADeX: A Tool for Automatic Curation of Design Decision Knowledge for Architectural Decision Recommendations

Abstract

Software architecture can be seen as a set of architectural design decisions. These decisions, especially their rationale, play an important role in understanding software systems and constraints that are imposed on future design decisions. Documenting and managing these design decisions takes a lot of effort and is therefore often neglected by software architects. Following our vision to avoid explicit architectural knowledge management, we present an innovative tool used in industrial practise that is able to automatically recover design decisions from natural language text. The identified design decisions are then used to automatically derive further architectural knowledge, including related quality attributes and architectural elements to inhibit architectural erosion. By automatically enriching architectural knowledge and providing recommendations, the tool offers effective support for software architects in the decision-making process. The knowledge base of the tool is automatically kept up to date with information from different systems used by architects during the software development lifecycle process.