Automating the Trace of Architectural Design Decisions and Rationales Using a MDD Approach

The impact of architecture is not only significant in the final structure of software, but also in the development process. Architecture itself is assembled by a network of design decisions (DD) composing a design rationale. Such rationale has often been neglected; however it is essential to deal with future change. This is also the role of traceability, the crosscutting relationship describing the evolution of software. The methodology ATRIUM provides the method to manage traceability, by using a Model-Driven Development (MDD) approach where every model element maintains links to related elements in previous and further stages. This proposal defines how these links have been exploited to support the tracing of DDs and their accompanying design rationales (DRs), and study their propagation. We also present how ATRIUM tools support this proposal by introducing DD/DRs and their traceability links from requirements to the target architectural model. These are automatically generated by M2M transformations, avoiding the error-prone task of managing them by hand.