M.: On the role of architectural design decisions in software product line engineering

Abstract. An increased attention to documenting architectural design decisions and their rationale has resulted in several approaches and prototype tools for capturing and managing architectural knowledge. However, most of them are focused on architecting single products and little attention has been paid to include design decisions in the context of product line architectures. This paper studies two similar research tools that capture architecture design decisions and how these can be extended to include product line specific features. We report the improvements needed by the data models of the two tools and we provide a unified data model as a research agenda to support both the relationships between design decisions and variability models in a product line context