Reusable Architectural Decision Models for Enterprise Application Development

Abstract. In enterprise application development and other software construction projects, a critical success factor is to make sound architectural decisions. Text templates and tool support for capturing architectural decisions exist, but have failed to reach broad adoption so far. One of the inhibitors we perceived on large-scale industry projects is that architectural decision capturing is regarded as a retrospective and therefore unwelcome documentation task which does not provide any benefit during the original design work. A major problem of such a retrospective approach is that the decision rationale is not available to decision makers when they identify, make, and enforce decisions. Often a large, possibly distributed, community of decision makers is involved in these three steps. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework for proactive decision identification, decision maker collaboration, and decision enforcement. Based on a meta model capturing reuse and collaborati...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: QOSA
• Authors: Olaf Zimmermann, Thomas Gschwind, Jochen Malte Küster, Frank Leymann, Nelly Schuster
• Keywords: Architectural Decision, Decision Maker, Decision Models, QOSA 2007