ABSTRACT
The puritan approach of using a method, framework, process, and so forth without tailoring it to fit the specific organization’s business, technical, and marketing context is naive at best. Like commercial software, software development and process frameworks, and methods were created with a relatively general audience in mind. This is true for ACDM as well. Tailoring the method has been a continual theme throughout the text. ACDM is a design process framework with numerous techniques, templates, checklists, and guidance to help practitioners adopt and tune the method for practical use in a variety of situations. Although ACDM is first and foremost a design process, it provides guidance for planning the production phases. However, ACDM lacks specific prescription for how to conduct the production phases. This has been omitted intentionally. Since the mid-1980s a tremendous amount of work has been done in the area of defining software development processes, measuring process effectiveness, and improving development processes. Numerous software development process frameworks have emerged over the years as a result of this work. The argument could be made that we do not need another one-which is why ACDM does not attempt to define the detailed software development process. Architectural design has been identified in numerous reports and studies as a key success factor in developing softwareintensive systems. However, it interesting to note that in general, modern software process frameworks do not address the specific details of the design process. ACDM tries to address this gap that is left by most process frameworks.
