A Design Map for Recording Precise Architecture Decisions

Explicit description of design decisions together with architecture design becomes an important basis for constructing and evolving quality systems. However since most of the architecture decisions remain implicit and undocumented, architecture documentation can not sufficiently support development and evolution because of its poor trace ability to system requirements. We believe that the information with which an architect can precisely estimate system´s runtime properties or qualities is the key to encourage explicit description of architecture decisions. In this paper we present a design map for recoding architecture decisions together with its underlying met model. The map provides an architect with relationships between non-functional properties and architecture styles. In addition, it comprises reasons for the relationship as well as detailed models for structure and behavior of relevant styles. An architect can use our map to obtain design alternatives and elaborate which of them to actually adopt to realize a system. Throughout this process, the architect can build up explicit description of design decisions. We also present a case study in which we show how to apply our design map to architecture design of a software system for airship navigation.