Facilitating Collaborative Decision Making with the Software Architecture Video Wall

Although capturing and documenting the design making process in software architecture is an important task, few tools exist to support the architect in this task. Often, such decisions are made during discussions with other stakeholders, but typically these remain implicit. We envision the Software Architecture Video Wall as a collaborative decision making tool for the software architect. The video wall serves as a whiteboard for discussions that automatically records the screenplay. Combined with the audio recordings of the discussion participants, a rich data set is obtained that may serve as input to track design decisions, and argumentation mining, to generate architecture rationale documentation. The video wall serves different uses as explained in several possible scenarios. However, as shown in the paper, much research is still required to realize this vision.