Abstract. Different organizations or organizational units are likely to store and maintain different types of information about their software architectures. This inhibits effective management of architectural knowledge. We experimented with a model of architectural knowledge to characterize the use of architectural knowledge in four different organizations. Based on this experimentation we identified four perspectives on architectural knowledge management, and additionally adjusted the model to better align theory with practice. The refined model defines a minimal set of concepts with supposedly complete coverage of the architectural knowledge domain. Because of the minimalistic aspect of the model, we refer to it as a 'core model' of architectural knowledge. Supporting evidence for the validity of our model, i.e. the supposed complete coverage, has been obtained by an attempt to falsify this claim through a comparison with selected literature. Application of the core model to characterize the use of architectural knowledge indicates possible areas of improvement for architectural knowledge management in the four organizations.

Global software development (GSD)

In the past few years, an increasing interest in architectural knowledge is recognized in the software architecture community. Architectural knowledge is generally regarded as important to guide the development of software systems. With the trend of Global Software Development (GSD), the management of architectural knowledge becomes even more important due to the geographical, temporal, and sociocultural distance innate to GSD. In this paper we build on the requirements engineering discipline to identify practices that can aid in overcoming GSD challenges and assess their applicability for management of architectural knowledge in a GSD setting. We provide a light-weight pattern language that we use to describe architectural knowledge management practices and provide a first validation of these practices from an ongoing case study.

Multi-site development organizations require coordination and communication efforts between different sites to ensure successful distributed development. These efforts need to be guided by a set of principles and statements on the software architecture that must be complied with throughout the organization: architectural rules. It is of paramount importance that multi-site development organizations incorporate measures in the architecting process to secure compliance with these rules throughout the organization. We describe a method to assess the degree to which compliance measures are secured in multi-site development organizations. We share our experience in applying this method in a large development organization in the consumer electronics domain.

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