Customizing the capture of software architectural design decisions

Significant challenges arise when capturing architectural knowledge and design decisions for a software project, resulting in high capturing effort and few captured decisions. These challenges stem from the fact that software development is a group activity that involves different situations, goals, methodologies and needs of the software development organization. A projectpsilas documentation processes should be flexible to suit the needs and goals of an organization and allow multiple approaches. We propose three approaches for capturing design decisions to increase the knowledge retention and decision capture rates in an organization: 1) formal elicitation; 2) lightweight top-down capture; and 3) lightweight bottom-up capture. Customizable capturing methods are suggested to implement the approaches and a tool is created for each approach. Industry feedback and preliminary findings show the feasibility of the proposed approaches.