Models are popular artefacts in the softwaredevelopment process which promise to improve stakeholdercommunication and the overall quality of a software systemunder construction. Recent research proposes that the use-fulness of models is not limited only to the software designphase: Empirical evidence indicates that manual analysis of arunning system is improved when models are linked to recordedruntime events. However, software architects are confrontedwith various design decisions when designing a system thatyields the required runtime events and correlates them tothe model elements they originate from. The contribution ofthis paper is a taxonomy of architectural design decisionsdistilled from a series of qualitative studies following a multi-method research study design: We utilized coding techniquesfrom Grounded Theory to build an initial taxonomy fromarchitectural concepts found in the literature, and verified andextended the taxonomy independently by five novice softwarearchitects in a practical scenario. The resulting taxonomycaptures essential architectural decisions when implementing asystem that supports the analysis of its runtime behaviour usingmodels. We then performed initial steps towards a architecturalguidance model by applying the taxonomy to another realisticscenario, following the Design Science Research method, inorder to analyze the properties and deepen our own technicalunderstanding of the captured concepts in the taxonomy.

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