Using Architectural Patterns to Define Architectural Decisions

During the architecture development process, architectural design decisions play an important role in maintaining non-functional properties of the system. Instead of supposing that architectural decisions are implicitly recognizable, existing works propose to give them first-class status. However, little focus is paid on the automation of architectural decision checking. This paper proposes to leverage pattern formalization techniques to document architectural decisions. The approach consists of a way to describe architectural patterns that hold the architectural decision definition, show how to integrate architectural decisions (patterns) into an architectural model and finally automate the architectural decision conformance checking.