A Command-Line Tool for Managing Recurring Architectural Decisions: Design, Implementation, and Empirical Evaluation

This thesis presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of ADG (Architectural Decision Guidance), a command-line tool for managing recurring architectural decisions. Based on previous conceptual work and a Clean Architecture decision handbook, ADG offers a structured, metadata-driven approach to managing the lifecycle of Architectural Decision Records (ADRs). Implemented in Go and aligned with Clean Architecture principles, ADG supports modular decision models using editable Markdown files, nested links, and guidance templates.

ADG facilitates the creation, tagging, linking, validation, and reuse of ADRs through 18 command-line interface (CLI) commands, promoting model-driven knowledge reuse across projects. One of its key features is support for guidance modeling, which allows curated decision templates to be instantiated and merged across contexts.

An empirical evaluation involving a software architect and a graduate student demonstrated the usability and practical relevance of the tool in realistic scenarios. ADG distinguishes between three roles: Knowledge Engineers, Model Tailors, and Architects/Developers. These roles enable collaboration through structured workflows. The result is an extensible CLI prototype that advances the practical tooling landscape for decision-centric architecture modeling.