Eagle: Effective Tool Support for Sharing Architectural Knowledge

Abstract

Knowledge management plays an important role in the software architecting process. Recently, this role has become more apparent by a paradigm shift that views a software architecture as the set of architectural design decisions it embodies. This shift has sparked the discussion in both research and practice on how to best facilitate sharing of so-called architectural knowledge, and how tools can best be employed. In order to design successful tool support for architectural knowledge sharing it is important to take into account what software architecting really entails. In this paper, we define the main characteristics of architecting, based on observations in a large software development organization, and state-of-the-art literature in software architecture. Based on the defined characteristics, we determine how best practices known from knowledge management could be used to improve architectural knowledge sharing. This results in the definition of a set of desired properties of architectural knowledge sharing tools. Finally, we highlight the design and implementation of EAGLE, an architectural knowledge sharing portal that implements those properties.

Software Architecture Documentation: The Road Ahead

“…For instance, a software architect needs requirements from business analysts, technical design from a system architect, project information from a project manager, design constraints from software team leaders, and so on. Since documented knowledge is often incomplete and out-of-date, tacit knowledge using personal communication is heavily used [4], but this is ineffective and error prone because knowledge availability is conditional upon the source of the knowledge. Knowledge is available only when the person who possesses the knowledge can be identified, and s/he is willing to share that knowledge, and s/he communicates the knowledge clearly and completely.…”

A Just-In-Time Architectural Knowledge Sharing Portal

“…These characteristics make it a better choice compared to existing commercial software such as Microsoft Sharepoint, because with Portaneo we are able to experiment more easily with the portal, while using little resources. For a more detailed discussion about the portal's architecture we refer to [11].…”

Software Architecture Knowledge Management

“…The project emphasizes sharing architectural knowledge in a distributed, global context. Some of the results so far can be found in [4,5,6,8,9,12,14].…”

“…In [12], we describe a prototype support suite for architectural knowledge sharing. The suite provides services to share both codified knowledge and personalized knowledge.…”