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.为在软件开发与维护过程中建立良好的架构实践并实现知识共享，需对架构设计决策（Architectural Design Decisions）进行文档化记录。 尽管现有大量关于架构决策文档化的研究，但鲜有方法能提供实践中适用性与实用性的实证依据。架构决策记录（Architecture Decision Records）是工业界流行的文档化方案，但目前缺乏针对如何在不同企业场景中引入架构决策记录的相关研究。 为弥补这一研究空白，我们与一家尚未对架构设计决策进行规范文档化的微服务架构系统开发企业合作，开展了一项行动研究。 本数据集包含本次研究的相关材料，具体包括两份调查问卷、访谈提纲以及分析过程中使用的编码相关信息。 本研究部分受克努特与艾丽斯·瓦伦堡基金会资助的沃伦贝克人工智能、自主系统与软件工程计划（WASP）支持。