Abstract
Design of an architecture for a software system affects not only the system's functional and/or non-functional properties but also the development processes such as coding, verification, maintenance, and so forth. Thus, technologies for supporting architectural design are extremely important to develop and maintain software of high quality. Architecture documentation of a system is also important, in particular when the system has a long life and is expected to keep its value in a required level over time. That is, documentation of an architecture becomes a convenient vehicle to convey traceability information between the architecture and other software configuration items such as system's requirement specification, design, program code, and so forth. In this paper we have surveyed the importance of software architecture design and architecture documentation in the context of software development with high quality. On architecture documentation we describe and explain the notions of architecture styles, patterns, concerns, views, and so forth. The relationships among these notions are explained as well. Moreover we present a literature review on the tools and technologies for architectural decision support, documenting design rationale, traceability and knowledge management.
