Exploring Extensibility of Architectural Design Decisions

Abstract

Software architectures represent the design of a system for describing its main relevant parts. Recently, recording and documenting architectural design decisions has attracted the attention of the software architecture community. Design decisions are an important piece during the architecting process that must be explicitly documented, but there is little evidence of successful reuse of this architectural knowledge. This work focuses on the reuse of design decisions in order to customize architectures. Specifically, we explore extensibility ideas from software product lines to show how architectures can be extended on the basis of design decisions. The documentation of synthesis architectures has received so far little attention, and particularly its reuse. This ongoing research describes an approach for product line synthesis architecture, where design decisions are introduced to promote its reuse.