Review of approaches to manage architectural knowledge in Agile Global Software Development

Abstract

Nowadays, Agile and Global Software Development (AGSD) has brought benefits and new challenges to the software industry. Among the main challenges is Architecture Knowledge Management (AKM), due to the following reasons: (i) in Agile Software Development team members prefer to convey knowledge in a face-to-face manner, over transmitting it through formal documents; and (ii) an efficient AKM in Global Software Development involves managing explicit knowledge. These opposite paradigms turn AKM into an unsolved issue in AGSD. In this study, the authors present a systematic mapping review about AKM in AGSD. From this review, they identified nine approaches that AGSD companies use to overcome the AKM challenge, which are grouped in three areas: (i) documentation artefact-based, (ii) communication-based, and (iii) methodological-based. Also, they found that the selected papers evenly support the three phases of the integrated knowledge management cycle (creation/capture, sharing/dissemination and acquisition/application), although only 7% of them support the capture of architectural knowledge in a formalised way. Finally, they conclude proposing critical points to consider in the implementation of AKM solutions in AGSD, and presenting their directions of future work.

Using meta-ethnography to synthesize research on knowledge management and agile software development methodology

“…The main purpose in [4] is architectural KM in Agile and Global Software Development (AGSD). A mapping study was conducted where the authors identified and described approaches to manage architectural knowledge in AGSD teams.…”

“…This fact leads the researchers to explore strategies of information representation in a leaner and more efficient way, as is the case of [1] and [22]. In KM, one of the main problems is how to [4], [6] represent knowledge so that it is easily shared [26]. Visualization techniques can minimize ambiguity and imprecision in interpreting shared information.…”

Addressing evolving requirements faced by the software industry

“…“A Mechanism to Explore Proactive Knowledge Retention in Open Source Software Communities” is authored by Rashid, Clarke, and O'Connor. Knowledge management and knowledge retention is a classic topic in software organizations and its connection with Open Source Software is very promising. In this paper, authors present a method towards the formation of proactive knowledge retention practices in Open Source Software projects to transform contributor's use of knowledge and engagement into knowledge relevant activities like knowledge sharing and transfer.…”

Towards a reduction in architectural knowledge vaporization during agile global software development

“…Several works address AKM in software engineering [28][29][30][31][32] , in GSD [33][34][35][36][37] , and even in ASD [6,38,39] ; however, these works do not cover AGSD environments. We, therefore, conducted a systematic mapping review (reported elsewhere [40] ), in which we identified nine approaches used to manage AK that were grouped into three areas: (1) artifact-based, (2) communication-based, and (3) methodology-based. The artifact-based documentation area refers to the use of software development support (repositories, wikis and groupware) to share AK, auto-generated documentation based on communication analysis (relating to emails and code repositories), and lightweight approaches to register architecture designs and decisions.…”