Scenario-Based Architectural Design Decisions Documentation and Evolution

Software architecture is considered as a set of architectural design decisions. Capturing and representing architectural design decisions during the architecting process is necessary for reducing architectural knowledge evaporation. Moreover, managing the evolution of architectural design decisions helps to maintain consistency between requirements and the deployed system. In this paper, we create the Triple View Model (TVM) as a general architecture framework for documenting architectural design decisions. The TVM clarifies the notion of architectural design decisions in three different views and covers key features of the architecting process. Based on the TVM, we propose a scenario-based methodology (SceMethod) to manage the documentation and evolution of architectural design decisions. We also conduct a case study on an industrial project to validate the applicability and the effectiveness of the TVM and the SceMethod. The results show they provide complete documentation on architectural design decisions for creating a system architecture, and well support architecture evolution with changing requirements.