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Zimmermann2  \n1 Institute for Parallel and Distributed Systems, University of Stuttgart  \nStuttgart, Germany  \n{[lastname}@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de](lastname}@ipvs.uni-stuttgart.de)  \n2 Institute for Software, Hochschule für Technik (HSR FHO)  \nRapperswil, Switzerland  \n[olaf.zimmermann@hsr.ch](olaf.zimmermann@hsr.ch)  \nAbstract. Architectural decision records answer “why” questions about designsand make tacit knowledge explicit. Many architectural decisions are made during development iterations because they have a close connection to the code. It is challenging to come up with task-specific decision capturing practices and supporting tools that are not perceived as time wasters; context switches and media breaks that harm the productivity of coding architects and developers involved in the decision making have to be avoided. To integrate existing architect-centric approaches into the developer toolchain, this paper presents a Markdown-based decision capturing template that we derived from previous work to enhance an existing decision capturing tool for developers. Our early validation results in the context of an open source project suggest that format and tool promise to contribute to an integrated decision capturing practice, with further enhancements being required. Tool and template are available in public GitHub repositories.  \n1 Introduction  \nSource code needs to be documented. This typically leads to comments in code and to external documents. Well-written classes and methods, which have expressive names and understandable branches [6], make low-level code comments obsolete. On the other end of the spectrum, however, wide-ranging decisions of high architectural significance are made during development iterations; these decisions are not self-explanatory and not expressed in the code explicitly. An example of such an architectural decision is how to keep user session data consistent and current across Web shop instances. Typically, these kind of decisions are recorded in external documentation files, wikis, or tools [18] . The primary tool of developers, however, is their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) with integrated version control system support. Requiring developers to use more tools has a negative impact on productivity, quality, and motivation to capture architecturally significant decisions: opening another tool requires some setup and training effort and leads to undesired, time consuming context switches. Furthermore, model-and documentcentric tools typically do not integrate themselves well in the developer’s toolchain: The documents are not committed in plain text format into the version control system—if versioned along the code at all. Further, the documents might get out of sync with the  \nN. Herzberg, C. Hochreiner, O. Kopp, J. Lenhard (Eds. ): 10th ZEUS Workshop, ZEUS 2018 , Dresden, Germany, 8-9 February 2018, published at [http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2072](http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2072)  \n56 Oliver Kopp et al.  \ncode base [13] . As a consequence, architectural decision capturing practices and tools oftentimes are perceived as chronophages (time wasters) . This holds true particularly for agile and lean developer communities. We therefore can derive the following problem statement:  \nHow to seamlessly integrate architectural decision making into developer tool landscapes— so that decision rationale can be collected under high coding velocity?  \nTo describe how we propose to overcome this problem, we first provide some background and related work (Sect. 2) . We then introduce the Markdown Architectural Decision Records (MADR) format as the conceptual contribution of this paper (Sect. 3) . Next, we present a tool implementation for MADR integration that makes our conceptual solution available to practitioners and validates the novel format (Sect. 4) . We have further validated the MADR format a","cbCaipqVJt2qFoiH","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaipqVJt2qFoiH","pdf",481725,"English","# Introduction\n# Background and Related Work","[{\"question\":\"Why are architectural decision records important?\",\"answer\":\"They answer “why” questions about designs and make tacit knowledge explicit so that architectural rationale is not lost outside the code.\"},{\"question\":\"What problem does the paper address regarding decision capturing?\",\"answer\":\"It aims to integrate architectural decision making into developer tool landscapes without harming productivity, especially by avoiding additional tools and keeping documentation in sync with the code base.\"},{\"question\":\"What is the paper’s main contribution?\",\"answer\":\"It introduces the Markdown Architectural Decision Records (MADR) format and describes a tool implementation that integrates MADR into developers’ tool workflows, validated through early results.\"}]","Markdown Architectural Decision Records - Format and Tool Support | PDF",1792981480]