Who and why?

The Open Decision Repository (ODR) project was initiated as part of the doctoral research by Uwe van Heesch, supervised by Paris Avgeriou. It is a joint-venture project of the research group Software Engineering and Architecture (SEARCH), which is part of the Department of Mathematics and Computing Science at the University of Groningen/NL and the Software Engineering study programme at the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Venlo/NL.

Goals

The Open Decision Repository project is located in the domain of software architecture and architectural design decisions (AD). The aim of this project is to implement a proof-of-concept Computer-aided Software Engineering tool that allows companies or single individuals like software architects to efficiently document software design decisions. The tool (hereinafter application) should be realized as a web application that is completely free of charge, publicly available and open source. It should provide functionality to document, browse, update and delete AD for user defined projects. One of the main goals is to increase pace in the AD documentation process, therefore the application requires a strong focus on usability. Shortly the project can be defined as following.

Development of a web application that provides functionality to document and visualize architectural design decisions for software-intensive systems. Besides the web application the ODR should also provide a web service and a Visual Paradigm plug-in.