Developers, architects and other stakeholders will take architecturally relevant decisions, based upon various decision criteria.

Criteria on the other hand may have different priorities for different stakeholders.

Ask your stakeholder for their specific criteria concerning important decisions: Besides purely technical criteria there might be organizational, formal, business-related or juristic (legal) criteria.

You can document importance/priorities either as numerical weight or in categories (i.a. A, B, C).

Below you find to hypothetical sets of decision criteria.

Example: Criteria for selection of web framework

ID	Criterion	Importance
C1	Functionality: AJAX support, validation rules, i18n	must
C2	High development velocity (compared to existing approach)	?
C3	Open source license, either Apache 2.0, MIT or CreativeCommons Sharelike 4.0	must
C4	Active developer community - alternatively: affordable professional support.	nice-to-have

Example: Criteria how to implement complex business rules

ID	Criterion	Weight (higher = more important)
C1	integratable into Java applications, without Java-native or similar approaches	100
C2	high rule-evaluation performance, at least 150 rule executions/second on 4 core I5/32GByte RAM	100
C3	license fee below €10.000 and yearly maintenance cost below €1000	80
C4	modularization concept for rules (as we will have >1000 rules)	90

When taking decisions… try the Pugh matrix

You might try the Pugh matrix for the actual decision-making process. No guarantee from our side…