Design Decisions in the Architecture Development of Advanced Systems: Towards traceable and sustainable Documentation and Communication

Future technical systems, so-called Advanced Systems (AS), will be significantly more capable than current ones, but also more complex. This increase in complexity needs to be addressed during the development of AS, which resembles an ongoing complex problem-solving process (PLP). In PLP, documenting and communicating decisions is paramount. A major result of PLP decision making is the system architecture, which defines the basic concepts and properties of the system. Documenting and communicating these design decisions properly is especially important since they allow later changes to remain traceable and organizationally sustainable. These activities are also relevant for learning and sustainably saving knowledge. Developers however lack the appropriate tools to do so, and thus often report in unstructured natural language and via different channels. Virtual collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams could significantly help documenting and communicating design decisions during the PLP. They are ideal for storing information such as decision rationales and for communicating them to different project stakeholders without changing systems. Nevertheless, developers still lack methodological guidelines and simple technical support for using them in the context of architecture development. As a first step, we therefore held semi-structured group interviews with various company representatives to identify problems in communicating and documenting design decisions and to evaluate solutions with employees. We found that developers lack uniform documentation processes and templates. In addition, they see documenting and communicating design decisions not as a significant part of their work, but nevertheless complain about incomplete and missing communication of these decisions. In this paper we report in detail our findings and use them to develop preliminary support methodology for documenting and communicating design decisions on collaboration platforms. The proposed methodology consists out of 4 phases: the identification, documentation, communication, and management of relevant design decisions. It includes tools and guidance to support developers in their daily work.