Introduction
Architecture Viewpoints for Documenting Architectural Technical Debt is a chapter in Economics-Driven Software Architecture. The authors are Zengyang Li, Peng Liang, and Paris Avgeriou (LLA). In this chapter, the authors propose a set of viewpoints which are meant to facilitate the documentation of architectural technical debt. This blog post provides a summary and commentary.
There are three stated contributions for this work. They are:
- Identify architectural technical debt stakeholders and their concerns.
- Propose their architecture viewpoints.
- Provide evidence for the effectiveness of their viewpoints.
Following a common pattern for articles on technical debt, the authors begin by describing what they mean by their use of the term. In this case technical debt is taken to mean the compromise of some quality attribute (QA) in exchange for a business advantages. Quality attributes can include things like modularity, encapsulation, maintainability or evolvability. Business advantages can include things like time to market and cost savings. Architectural technical debt (ATD), specifically is when architectural decisions are made that incur or repay technical debt. As seen in this work, architectural debt normally influences maintainability or evolvability.
