Capturing and Maintaining Architectural Knowledge Using Context Information

An expert survey on kinds, influence factors and documentation of design decisions in practice

“…This partly confirms our own work on context-based architecture knowledge provisioning [11], though additional support for cooperative architecting is required, since decisions are usually discussed and made in teams. Finding documentation could be supported by documenting decisions with requirements and qualities because developers tend to think about the problems to be addressed with a decision.…”

“…When architectural knowledge is captured adequately, it serves as a means of preserving otherwise tacit knowledge. However, capturing and maintaining design decisions and their rationale raise the same issues as creating and maintaining other kinds of documentation, such as the high amount of effort involved in documentation [2,3], the lack of immediate benefits [4], the lack of time and budget [5] and the general to support the capture and maintenance architectural decisions during architectural reviews through context information [11] and through providing a conceptual framework for capturing specific types of architectural decisions and influence factors for such decisions. On a technical level, we intend to (automatically) detect design decisions in code and other artifacts and to support the (manual) recapturing of the rationale for the detected decisions.…”