The loss of architectural knowledge during system evolution: An industrial case study

Architecture defines the components of a system and their dependencies. The knowledge about how the architecture is intended to be implemented is essential to keep the system structure coherent and thereby comprehensible. In practice, this architectural knowledge is explicitly formulated only in the documentation (if at all), which usually gets outdated very soon. This leads to a growing amount of implicit knowledge during evolution that is especially volatile in projects with high developer fluctuation. In this paper we present a case study about the loss of architectural knowledge in three industrial projects to answer the following research questions: 1) to what degree is the architectural documentation kept in conformance with the code? 2) how well does the documentation reflect the intended architecture?, 3) how big is the architectural decay?, and 4) what are the causes for nonconformances? We answer these questions by investigating the architecture documentation, the source ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: IWPC
• Authors: Martin Feilkas, Daniel Ratiu, Elmar Jürgens
• Keywords: Architectural Knowledge, Documentation, Intended Architecture, IWPC 2009, Software Engineering