An Enhanced Architectural Knowledge Metamodel Linking Architectural Design Decisions To Other Artifacts In The Software Engineering Lifecycle

Software architects create and consume many interrelated artifacts during the architecting process. These artifacts may represent functional and nonfunctional requirements, architectural patterns, infrastructure topology units, code, and deployment descriptors as well as architecturally significant design decisions. Design decisions have to be linked to chunks of architecture description in order to achieve a fine-grained control when a design is modified. Moreover, it is imperative to identify quickly the key decisions affected by a runtime change that are critical for a system's mission. This paper extends previous work on architectural knowledge with a metamodel for architectural decision capturing and sharing to: (i) create and maintain fine-grained dependency links between the entities during decision identification, making, and enforcement, (ii) keep track of the evolution of the decisions, and (iii) support runtime decisions.