Architecture Decision Records in Practice: An Action Research Study

To establish good architectural practice and knowledge sharing during software development and maintenance, architectural design decisions need to be documented. While a lot of research has been done on documenting architectural decisions, there exist few approaches with empirical evidence on their applicability and usefulness in practice. Architecture Decision Records are a popular documentation approach in industry, but there is a lack of research focusing on how Architecture Decision Records can be introduced in different company contexts. To tackle this shortcoming, we performed an action research study in cooperation with a company that develops a microservice-based system without proper architecture design decision documentation. This dataset encompasses our study material consisting of two questionnaires, our interview guides, and information on the codes used during our analysis. This work was partially supported by the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems and Software Program (WASP) funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation.