Reusable Architectural Decision Models for Quality-Driven Decision Support: A Case Study from a Smart Cities Software Ecosystem

Architectural design decisions and architectural knowledge are becoming relevant in the current practice of software architecture. In addition, reusable architectural knowledge has gained much importance in the industrial practice. In the process of architectural decision making, quality attributes constitute key drivers for designing software systems, therefore, it is important to document quality attributes along with the decisions captured. However, most of the current tools for management of architectural decisions focus mainly on capturing or sharing of design decisions. We propose to enrich a reusable architectural decision meta-model with quality attributes and introduce a corresponding tool. Our goal is to support software architects during decision making based on reusable decisions driven by quality attributes. Our approach was motivated by and applied in an industrial case study on a large-scale software ecosystem for smart cities, that constitute a complex and challenging system-of-systems domain. We applied our proposal in a few scenarios in the smart cities domain, in which the consideration of quality attributes is required to model reusable architectural knowledge adequately.