Can LLMs Generate Architectural Design Decisions? - An Exploratory Empirical studyResearch Paper
Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) involves the organized handling of information related to architectural decisions and design within a project or organization. An essential artefact of AKM is the Architecture Decision Records (ADR), which documents key design decisions. ADRs are documents that capture decision context, decision made and various aspects related to a design decision, thereby promoting transparency, collaboration, and understanding. Despite their benefits, ADR adoption in software development has been slow due to challenges like time constraints and inconsistent uptake. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) may help bridge this adoption gap by facilitating ADR generation. However, the effectiveness of LLM for ADR generation or understanding is something that has not been explored. To this end, in this work, we perform an exploratory study which aims to investigate the feasibility of using LLM for the generation of ADRs given the decision context. In our exploratory study, we utilize GPT and T5-based models with 0-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning approaches to generate the Decision of an ADR given its Context. Our results indicate that in a 0-shot setting, state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4 generate relevant and accurate Design Decisions, although they fall short of human-level performance. Additionally, we observe that more cost-effective models like GPT-3.5 can achieve similar outcomes in a few-shot setting, and smaller models such as Flan-T5 can yield comparable results after fine-tuning. To conclude, this exploratory study suggests that LLM can generate Design Decisions, but further research is required to attain human-level generation and establish standardized widespread adoption.
Fri 7 JunDisplayed time zone: Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, New Delhi change
14:00 - 15:30 | Session 6A: Architecture Design & Rationale 1New and Emerging Ideas / Research Papers Session Chair: Ingo Weber, TU Munich and Fraunhofer Gesellschaft | ||
14:00 25mResearch paper | Informed and Assessable Observability Design Decisions in Cloud-native Microservice ApplicationsResearch Paper Research Papers A: Maria C Borges Technische Universität Berlin, A: Joshua Bauer Technische Universität Berlin, A: Sebastian Werner TU Berlin, Germany, A: Michael Gebauer TU Berlin, Germany, A: Stefan Tai Technische Universität Berlin Pre-print | ||
14:25 25mResearch paper | Can LLMs Generate Architectural Design Decisions? - An Exploratory Empirical studyResearch Paper Research Papers A: Rudra Dhar SERC, IIIT Hyderabad, India, A: Karthik Vaidhyanathan IIIT Hyderabad, A: Vasudeva Varma International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad Pre-print | ||
14:50 25mResearch paper | Supporting Architectural Decision Making on Training Strategies in Reinforcement Learning ArchitecturesResearch Paper Research Papers A: Evangelos Ntentos University of Vienna, A: Stephen John Warnett University of Vienna, A: Uwe Zdun University of Vienna | ||
15:15 20mResearch paper | Towards Connecting Bugs and Architecture in Software Systems: A PerspectiveNEMI New and Emerging Ideas |