Abstract Current software architecture practices have been focused on modeling and documenting the architecture of a software system by means of several architectural views. In practice, the standard architecture documentation lacks explicit description of the decisions made and their underlying rationale, which often leads to knowledge loss. This fact strongly affects the maintenance activities as we need to spend additional effort to replay the decisions made as well as to understand the changes performed in the design. Hence, codifying this architectural knowledge is a challenging task that requires adequate tool support. In this research, we test the capabilities of Architecture Design Decision Support System (ADDSS), a web‐based tool for supporting the creation, maintenance, use, and documentation of architectural design decisions (ADD) with their architectures. We used ADDSS to codify architectural knowledge and to maintain those trace links between the design decisions and other software artefacts that would help in the maintenance operations. We illustrate the usage of the tool through four different experiences and discuss the potential benefits of using this architectural knowledge and its impact on the maintenance and evolution activities. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Capturing and using design rationale is becoming a hot topic for software architects, as architectural design decisions are now considered first class entities that should be recorded and documented explicitly. Capturing such architecture knowledge has been underestimated for several years as architects have been only focused on documenting their architectures and neglecting the rationale that led to them. The importance of recording design rationale becomes enormous for maintenance and evolution activities, as design decisions can be replayed in order to avoid highly cost architecture recovery processes. Hence, in this work we describe how architecture design decisions can be captured and documented with specific tool support. We also provide effort estimation in capturing such knowledge and we compare this with architecture modeling efforts in order to analyze the viability of knowledge capturing strategies.

This paper describes the ADDSS tool which enables capturing and documenting architectural design decisions in order to avoid knowledge vaporization.