Using wikis to support architectural knowledge management in global software development

Abstract

In the past few years, the software architecture community has shown an increasing interest in architectural knowledge. In Global Software Development (GSD), software engineering practices are performed at geographically separate locations. With this trend, the management of architectural knowledge becomes even more important due to the geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural distance involved with GSD. Practices for architectural knowledge management in global software development may alleviate challenges associated with this distance. In this paper, we identify to what extent these practices may be implemented using wikis. We relate the practices to generic wiki functionalities and conclude that wikis form a good mechanism to implement a hybrid strategy for managing architectural knowledge in global software development and that a substantial part of the AKM practices may be implemented using wikis.

Automatic enforcement of constraints in real-time collaborative architectural decision making

“…In addition, Compendium (Shahin et al, 2010) supports a visual environment for documenting and visualizing design rationale behind architectural design decisions for multiple users. In some cases, also, Wiki-based tools are proposed (Clerc et al, 2010) to assist architectural knowledge management performed at geographically separate locations. However, collaborative work is not the main focus of these tools, and thus, the challenges of making and documenting architectural decisions collaboratively are not studied in aforementioned works.…”

“…Approaches that target collaborative architectural decision support (see, e.g., Babar and Gorton, 2007;Clerc et al, 2010;Liang et al, 2009;Nowak and Pautasso, 2013;Schuster et al, 2007;Shahin et al, 2010; mainly focus on team building, achieving consensus, making of trade-offs, and sharing of architectural knowledge. However, none of these approaches considers the various stakeholders' decision making constraints due to their roles in the development process.…”

An Approach to Software Architecting in Agile Software Development Projects in Education

“…Last but not least, the need was introduced for the PO to be able to quickly look-up architectural choices per group (as the PO has to switch between numerous groups loosing track of the group choices). ─ Where: We offered the teams to document either in a traditional document or in wiki page in the agile management tool aiming at reducing the risk of decoupling the development process from the architecture document [22,28]. We did not offer to include the stakeholders' concerns in sprint backlogs as concerns live beyond a sprint.…”

Exploring the use of Wikis for information sharing in interdisciplinary design

“…Wiki technology has been known to benefit distributed design teams, particularly on project management and software documentation (Clerc et al, 2010;Wei et al, 2005;Xiao, 2007).…”