Extending Software Architecting Processes with Decision-Making Activities

Abstract

Abstract. The traditional perspective on software architecture has paid much attention to architecting as a development process aimed at creating the architecture of a software system, as well as the documentation used to communicate the architecture to the stakeholders by means of several architectural views. Recently, the software architecture research community has faced the need to record, manage, and document the design decisions and the rationale that lead to such architecture. Because architectures are the result of a set of design decisions, this design rationale must be properly recorded and managed as a complementary process to the modelling activity. In this paper we detail different types of decision-making activities aimed at creating and using design decisions and how these can be supported with tool support.