A "decision view" provides a useful addition and complement to more traditional sets of architectural views and viewpoints; it gives an explanatory perspective that illuminates the reasoning process itself and not solely its results. This decision view documents aspects of the architecture that are hard to reverse-engineer from the software itself and that are often left tacit. The decision view and the decisions that it captures embody high-level architectural knowledge that can be transferred to other practitioners, merged when systems are merged, and offer useful support for the maintenance of large and long-lived software-intensive systems. This article leads the reader through a succession of epiphanies: from design to architecture, then architecture representation to architecture design methods, and finally to architectural design decisions.

Abstract