ArchWiki

Abstract

Software architecture plays an important part in program comprehension, which is one of the most time consuming tasks in software development. If software developers don’t properly share their architectural knowledge with team members, the team will act based on an incomplete or even possibly incorrect view on the code base, and this can lead to architectural degradation. Recently there has been a surge of collaboration, communication and sharing with the advent of Web 2.0 applications. In this thesis we have investigated how Web 2.0 can be used to support software architecture management. In particular in the area of architecture documentation, architecture retrieval, and collaboration. We created an approach which applies Web 2.0 concepts such as traceability, integration, usability, navigability, and user experience, to software architecture management. This approach is supported by a prototype tool called ArchWiki, which has features such as traceability between different artifacts (e.g. source code, architectural diagrams, architectural documentation), context-sensitive views, hyperlinks, notifications, tags, and bookmarks. We performed an initial evaluation study to assess ArchWiki. In this study we found that Web 2.0 has the potential to support software architecture knowledge management.