Software Engineering Institute

Attribute Driven Design (ADD)—a method for designing software architectures—was developed by the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute. The first version of ADD was published in January 2000, and the second version was published in November 2006. Recently we have made some improvements to the method to increase its adoption by the software architecture community. ADD 2.0 focused on a conceptual architecture design and promoted the use of Patterns and Tactics as key concepts that drive the design process. Our experience, however, has shown that other important design concepts, including reference architectures and frameworks, are used in architectural design by practitioners. Furthermore, when ADD 2.0 was created, agile methods were not widespread. As a consequence, the method does not provide insights on how to use it in a more agile setting. To address these issues, we have created a new version of the method that we call ADD 3.0.

In this tutorial, we will introduce ADD 3.0 and explain the key changes that we made to its previous version. We will also present a detailed case study and walk the participants through a few iterations of the method, showing how the steps are performed. We will place particular emphasis on the design decisions that are made in the different design iterations. Finally, we will make a brief comparison of ADD to other design methods and close with a general discussion.