Design decision trees

The paper proposes a formalism to be used as a systematic approach to incrementally document, refine, organise and reuse the architectural knowledge for software design. The formalism is a hierarchical organisation of design patterns into a design decision tree (DDT) that is a partial ordering of design decisions put in the context of the problem requirements and the constraints imposed by earlier decisions. Our model supports the representation of the essential problems that recur in the domain, knowledge of alternative solutions to these problems and the implications of the solutions. This model integrates architectural knowledge of software design into a software development process