Track: Documenting Design and Architecture

Abstract: Designing means making a succession of choices. A "decision view" of architecture embodies architectural knowledge of a higher level, which can be transferred to other practitioners, merged when systems are merged, and offers useful support for the maintenance of large and long-lived software-intensive systems. It gives an explanatory perspective, that illuminates the reasoning process itself and is not solely the result of that reasoning process and it documents aspects of the architecture that are often left tacit and hard to reverse-engineer from the software itself.

Level: Intermediate

Keywords: Software architecture, design, knowledge management, decision, rationale