Architecture Design Decision Support System
Today, Software Architectures are used successfully by software architects to describe the main part parts of a system. The aim of a good architecture is to support better the evolution and maintenance issues by exploiting the common and variable parts of a set of related systems.
Recently, the traditional perspective on software architecture is changing to incorporate expliclty the design decisions that led to a particular architecture. Therefore, architectures are seen as the result of a set of design decisions that must be explicitly recorded and documented as cross-cutting concerns that affect other architectural views.
By recording the rationale and the motivations that are part of the design decisions made, we should be able to replay such decisions as a way to reduce the effort spent in maintenance and evolution activities. Hence, recording the decisions lost in the archicteting process becomes a key goal to achieve for software architects, as decisions are used to bridge the gap between requirements and architectural products.
To cover this gap, we support the creation, use, maintenance, and documentation or architectural design decisions with specifc tool support like ADDSS, a research tool which enables to store and document design decisions as first class entities under an iterative approach, in the same way as architects buid their architectures.
We hope you will enjoy the simplicity of use of ADDSS to store and maintain such relevant architectural knowledge!!!