The Architecture Documentation Maturity Model ADM2

Today, the architectures of software systems are not stable for their whole lifetime but often adapted driven by business needs. Preserving their quality characteristics beyond each of these changes requires deep knowledge of the requirements and the systems themselves. Proper documentation reduces the risk that knowledge is lost and hence is a base for the system’s maintenance in the long-run. However, the influence of architectural documentation on the maintainability of software systems is neglected in current quality assessment methods. They are limited to documentation for anticipated change scenarios and do not provide a general assessment approach. In this paper, we propose a maturity model for architecture documentation. It is shaped relative to growing quality preservation maturity and independent of specific technologies or products. It supports the weighting of necessary effort against reducing long-term risks in the maintenance phase. This allows to take product maintainability requirements into account for selecting an appropriate documentation maturity level.