a b s t r a c tRecent research suggests that architectural knowledge, such as design decisions, is important and should be recorded alongside the architecture description. Different approaches have emerged to support such architectural knowledge (AK) management activities. However, there are different notions of and emphasis on what and how architectural activities should be supported. This is reflected in the design and implementation of existing AK tools. To understand the current status of software architecture knowledge engineering and future research trends, this paper compares five architectural knowledge management tools and the support they provide in the architecture life-cycle. The comparison is based on an evaluation framework defined by a set of 10 criteria. The results of the comparison provide insights into the current focus of architectural knowledge management support, their advantages, deficiencies, and conformance to the current architectural description standard. Based on the outcome of this comparison a research agenda is proposed for future work on AK tools.

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a b s t r a c tOver the last two decades, software product lines have been used successfully in industry for building families of systems of related products, maximizing reuse, and exploiting their variable and configurable options. In a changing world, modern software demands more and more adaptive features, many of them performed dynamically, and the requirements on the software architecture to support adaptation capabilities of systems are increasing in importance. Today, many embedded system families and application domains such as ecosystems, service-based applications, and self-adaptive systems demand runtime capabilities for flexible adaptation, reconfiguration, and post-deployment activities. However, as traditional software product line architectures fail to provide mechanisms for runtime adaptation and behavior of products, there is a shift toward designing more dynamic software architectures and building more adaptable software able to handle autonomous decision-making, according to varying conditions. Recent development approaches such as Dynamic Software Product Lines (DSPLs) attempt to face the challenges of the dynamic conditions of such systems but the state of these solution architectures is still immature. In order to provide a more comprehensive treatment of DSPL models and their solution architectures, in this research work we provide an overview of the state of the art and current techniques that, partially, attempt to face the many challenges of runtime variability mechanisms in the context of Dynamic Software Product Lines. We also provide an integrated view of the challenges and solutions that are necessary to support runtime variability mechanisms in DSPL models and software architectures.

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.

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