Improving understandability of architecture design through visualization of architectural design decision

Concentrating on components and connectors in traditional approaches to document software architecture causes the problems, such as high costs for architecture change and erode during architecture evolution. These problems result in a tendency to record architectural design decisions and their rationale made throughout architecting process. This tendency encourages practitioners and researchers to develop various models and related tools to model, capture, manage, share, and (re)use architectural design decisions. But there still remains a need to visualize and explore architectural design decisions due to the huge number of decisions and relationships among them in large and complex systems development. In this paper, we first make a survey on tools that support visualization of architectural design decisions, their features and deficiencies. Second we investigate how Compendium tool can be employed as a general tool to visualize architectural design decisions and their rationale. Last we present how the visualization by Compendium can improve the understandability and support the communication of architectural design in architecting process.