Step 6 – Sketching views and recording design decisions

Views should be sketched recording the solution designed so that it can be communicated. In this step, all of the design decisions that were made during this particular iteration are documented. This documentation should also include the design rationale.

The artifacts created in this step can simply be sketches and do not have to be the formal, detailed software architecture views. In the ADD process, the creation of the architecture views comes later, but the design decisions made in this iteration should be reflected in sketches that can then be used in the formal architecture views later.

We will explore documenting software architectures in Chapter 12Documenting and Reviewing Software Architectures.