Architectural design decision: Existing models and tools

In the field of software architecture, there has been a paradigm shift from describing the outcome of architecting process mostly described by component and connector (know-what) to documenting architectural design decisions and their rationale (know-how) which leads to the production of an architecture. This paradigm shift results in emergence of various models and related tools for capturing, managing and sharing architectural design decisions and their rationale explicitly. This paper analyzes existing architectural design decisions models and provides a criteria-based comparison on tools that support these models. The major contribution of this paper is twofold: to show that all of these models have a consensus on capturing the essence of an architectural design decision; and to clarify the major difference among the tools and show what desired features are missing in these tools.