In the recent years, the software architecture community has proposed to use architectural design decisions (ADDs) for capturing the design rationale and recording the architectural knowledge (AK). As software systems evolve both ADDs and architectural designs need to be documented, maintained, and synchronized. This is a tedious and time-consuming task because of the lack of reusable support for bridging between ADDs and designs, for instance through a formal mapping or automated tools. As a result, decisions and designs become inconsistent over time. We propose in this paper to alleviate this problem by introducing an AK transformation language supporting reusable AK transformations from pattern-based design decisions to component-and-connector models. In addition, we devise reusable consistency checking rules for verifying and maintaining the consistency between the decisions and the designs. Through the use of model-driven transformations and consistency checking rules, as well as reusable, pattern-based decision models, we ensure the reusability of our approach. The instantiation and enactment of the AK transformations and consistency rules are performed automatically. We apply our approach in the context of an industrial case study and show that it offers high reusability, is largely automated and scalable, and can deal with the complexity of even large numbers of recurring decisions.

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