Decision architect – A decision documentation tool for industry

An exploratory case study on reusing architecture decisions in software-intensive system projects

“…In the past decade, several approaches for documenting architecture decisions in software projects have been proposed (Tang et al, 2010;Capilla et al, 2015). The majority of these approaches are codification-approaches, in which decisions are explicitly documented like PADME (Babar et al, 2005), EAGLE (Farenhorst et al (2007a)), ADWiki (Schuster et al, 2007), ADvISE (Lytra et al, 2013), or Decision Architect (Manteuffel et al, 2016). Only a few approaches employ aspects of a knowledge personalization strategy, capturing "who knows what" about a decision rather than documenting the decision itself (Dingsøyr and van Vliet, 2009).…”

“…Most approaches identify decision-reuse as an important stakeholder concern. For example, the decision management tools proposed by Nowak and Pautasso (2013), Farenhorst and van Vliet ( 2008) and Manteuffel et al (2016) all mention support for reusing AK, although their main focus lies on capturing decisions while no concrete guidance is given on how decisions can actually be reused in the architecting process and for which purposes. According to Nowak and Pautasso (2010), the creation of a company-wide repository of reusable decisions and its adaptation into industry practices remains an unsolved problem.…”

The GRADE Decision Canvas for Classification and Reflection on Architecture Decisions

“…In (Van Heesch et al, 2012b) the system context of decisions is defined by a set of forces affecting the problem, i.e., any aspect of the problem considered when solving it. In (Manteuffel et al, 2016) the implementation of a tool for documenting decisions is presented. The authors show that it increases quality of decision documentation and productivity, while it is considered highly useful to software architects.…”

Architectural decision-making as a financial investment: An industrial case study

“…One of the most important tasks of software architects is to make architectural decisions [16]. This is a particularly challenging task since architecture decisions often affect large parts of the system and impact quality attributes; consequently, one needs to get them right from the beginning as they are very hard to change in the future [22]. The difficulty of these decisions is further aggravated by having to consider not only technical factors (such as reusability, maintainability, testability, etc.…”