High-Level Design Stories in Architecture-Centric Agile Development

Capturing and communicating the architecture decisions of a project is very important in architecture knowledge management, so that those decisions can deliver value to the system stakeholders and also support the system implementation. In agile development contexts, there is often a balancing act between documenting the design decisions in detail and keeping the documentation efforts to a level tolerable for the project. To this end, we present the notion of High-level Design stories (or HLDs), as small, modular artifacts that record the main design decisions and their context, but also include information about architecture assumptions, quality-attribute analysis, and pending issues for the system. HLDs are intended to be created and refined during the different phases of an architecture-centric development process, and assist in the validation of the decisions (and pending issues) in that process. This way, a global (although detailed) architecture design can be obtained from the combination of the HLDs. In this work, we discuss the pros and cons of using HLDs for design decisions based on experiences from an industrial software project.