Software architectures represent the design for describing the main parts of a software system. In software projects, different stakeholders with different roles may need to share the documentation generated during the project. Also, during the architecture construction phase we need to communicate the architecture to the stakeholders involved in the process, but the lack of tools for documenting, managing and sharing this architectural knowledge constitutes a big barrier. In other cases it can be useful to recreate the design decisions taken because such decisions are frequently lost during the development process. To cover these issues, we outline in this paper a web-based tool able to record and manage architecture design decisions.
Software architecture has been widely used to describe the design of a software system. Its maintenance over time can be costly, especially when maintainers have to recover software architecture knowledge due to poor design documentation. Capturing design decisions is one important aspect in documenting design and even though there has been some work in this area, there has been little emphasis on the evolution of design decisions. In this paper, we analyze design decision models and the issues of not capturing evolving decisions. To tackle these issues, we propose a set of decision attributes that can be used to support evolving decision models.
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