Abstract
The software architecture community is shifting its attention to architectural design decisions as a key element of architectural knowledge. Although there has been much work dealing with the representation of design decisions as formal structures within architecture, there still remains a need to investigate the exploratory nature of the design decisions themselves. We present in this paper a tool that should help improve the quality of software architecture by enabling design decision exploration and analysis through decision visualization. Unlike many other design decision tools which acquire, list, and perform queries on decisions, our tool provides visualization components to help with decision exploration and analysis. Our tool has four main aspects: 1) the decision and relationship lists; 2) decision structure visualization view; 3) decision chronology view; and 4) decision impact view. Together, these four aspects provide an effective and powerful means for decision exploration and analysis.
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Lee, L., Kruchten, P. (2008). A Tool to Visualize Architectural Design Decisions. In: Becker, S., Plasil, F., Reussner, R. (eds) Quality of Software Architectures. Models and Architectures. QoSA 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5281. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87879-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-87879-7_3
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