An approach to documenting and evolving architectural design decisions

Software architecture is considered as a set of architectural design decisions (ADDs). Capturing and representing ADDs during the architecting process is necessary for reducing architectural knowledge evaporation. Moreover, managing the evolution of ADDs helps to maintain consistency between requirements and the deployed system. In this work, we create the Triple View Model (TVM) as a general architecture framework for documenting ADDs. The TVM clarifies the notion of ADDs in three different views and covers key features of the architecting process. Based on the TVM, we propose a scenario-based method (SceMethod) to manage the documentation and the evolution of ADDs. Furthermore, we also develop a UML metamodel that incorporates evolution-centered characteristics to manage evolutionary architectural knowledge. We conduct a case study to validate the applicability and the effectiveness of our model and method. In our future work, we plan to investigate how to support ADD documentation and evolution in geographically separated software development (GSD).