The Decision View of Software Architecture

Documenting software architectures is a key aspect to achieve success when communicating the architecture to different stakeholders. Several architectural views have been used with different purposes during the design process. The traditional view on software architecture defines this in terms of components and connectors. Also, the “4+1” view model proposes several views from the same design to satisfy the interests of the different stakeholders involved in the modelling process. In this position paper we try to go a step beyond previous proposals, to detail the idea of considering the architecture as a composition of architectural design decisions. We will propose a set of elements, information and graphical notation to record the design decisions during the modelling process.