A Pattern driven Approach against Architectural Knowledge Vaporization

Architectural documentation is often considered as a tedious and resource intensive task, that is usually skipped or performed inadequately. As a result the rationale of the architect’s decisions gets lost. This problem is known as architectural knowledge vaporization. We propose a documentation approach for architectural decisions concerning the application of software patterns. Based on the assumption that patterns and pattern languages incorporate generic architectural knowledge, we recommend reusing this documented knowledge in application specific architecture documentation to preserve an important part of the rationale, that went into the architect’s decisions, while saving time compared to other documentation approaches.