Systematic Architectural Decision Management, A Process-Based Approach

The documentation of architecture and design decisions lies at the backbone of building a comprehensive architectural knowledge basis within a company. As a consequence, a plethora of supporting frameworks has been lately proposed by the research community. The existing frameworks focus on capturing the rationale that lies behind a certain decision, but less on sustaining the collaborative process that architects employ when making decisions. In this paper, we propose an innovative architectural decision making process that sustains the collaboration of architects, the timely notification of involved stakeholders, the inclusion of feedback cycles to improve the overall quality of the architecting process and a tag-based traceability system that leverages informal learning. The analysis of the current state of the practice in the industry has been conducted within various workshops and interviews with our industry cooperation partner - the software provider of one of the biggest insurance trusts worldwide. Based on these results, we have identified various improvement potentials that are still not addressed by existing research in the field.