Tailoring knowledge sharing to the architecting process

ABSTRACT

Sharing knowledge pertaining to software architectures becomes increasingly important. If this knowledge is not explicitly stored or communicated, valuable knowledge dissipates. However, knowledge sharing is challenged by the fact that stakeholders are often located at large distances from each other, now that offshoring and virtual organizations become the trend. We conjecture that successful architectural knowledge sharing is only possible when the sharing mechanisms are tailored to the architecting process. We base this claim on observations made during a case study in a large software organization, and some important lessons learned from these observations.

REFERENCES

• 1: V. R. Basili, G. Caldiera, and D. H. Rombach. The experience factory. In Encyclopedia of Software Engineering, volume 2 Volume Set, pages 469--476. John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1994.
• 2: J. Bosch. Software architecture: The next step. In Software Architecture: First European Workshop (EWSA 2004), volume 3047 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 194--199, St. Andrews, UK, 2004. Springer-Verlag.
• 3: R. C. de Boer, R. Farenhorst, J. S. v. d. Ven, V. Clerc, R. Deckers, P. Lago, and H. v. Vliet. Structuring software architecture project memories. In the 8th International Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2006.
• 4: T. Dingsoyr, P. Lago, and H. v. Vliet. Rationale promotes learning about architectural knowledge. In the 8th International Workshop on Learning Software Organizations (LSO), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2006.
• 5: P. Eeles. Characteristics of a software architect. Technical report, IBM developerWorks Rational, 15 March 2006. Available online: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/mar06 /eeles/index.html.
• 6: R. Farenhorst, R. C. de Boer, R. Deckers, P. Lago, and H. v. Vliet. Whats in constructing a domain model for sharing architectural knowledge? In the 18th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE), San Francisco Bay, USA, 2006.
• 7: M. T. Hansen, N. Nohria, and T. Tierney. What's your strategy for managing knowledge? Harvard Business Review, 77(2):106--116, 1999.
• 8: Christine Hofmeister , Philippe Kruchten , Robert L. Nord , Henk Obbink , Alexander Ran , Pierre America, Generalizing a Model of Software Architecture Design from Five Industrial Approaches, Proceedings of the 5th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA'05), p.77-88, November 06-10, 2005 [doi>10.1109/WICSA.2005.36]
• 9: P. Kruchten, P. Lago, and H. v. Vliet. Building up and reasoning about architectural knowledge. In the Second International Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures (QoSA), Stockholm, Sweden, 2006.
• 10: Jeff Tyree , Art Akerman, Architecture Decisions: Demystifying Architecture, IEEE Software, v.22 n.2, p.19-27, March 2005 [doi>10.1109/MS.2005.27]
• 11: J. S. v. d. Ven, A. G. J. Jansen, J. A. G. Nijhuis, and J. Bosch. Design decisions: The bridge between rationale and architecture. In A. H. Dutoit, R. McCall, I. Mistrik, and B. Paech, editors, Rationale Management in Software Engineering. Springer-Verlag, 2006.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
architecting process, architectural knowledge, knowledge management, knowledge sharing, software architecture