In enterprise application development and other software construction projects, a critical success factor is to make sound
architectural decisions. Text templates and tool support for capturing architectural decisions exist, but have failed to reach
broad adoption so far. One of the inhibitors we perceived on large-scale industry projects is that architectural decision
capturing is regarded as a retrospective and therefore unwelcome documentation task which does not provide any benefit during
the original design work. A major problem of such a retrospective approach is that the decision rationale is not available
to decision makers when they identify, make, and enforce decisions. Often a large, possibly distributed, community of decision
makers is involved in these three steps. In this paper, we propose a new conceptual framework for proactive decision identification,
decision maker collaboration, and decision enforcement. Based on a meta model capturing reuse and collaboration aspects explicitly,
our framework instantiates decision models from requirements models and re usable decision templates. These templates capture
know ledge gained on other projects em ploy ing the same architectural style. As an exemplary application of these concepts
to service-oriented architecture shows, reusable architectural decision models can speed up the decision identification and
improve the quality of the decision making. Reusable architectural decision models can also simplify the exchange of architecture
design rationale within and between project teams, and expose decision out come as model transformation parameters in model-driven
software development.
Keywords Architectural decision - architectural knowledge - MDA - SOA