Towards Reusing Architectural Knowledge as Design Guides

In recent years, architectural knowledge management has demonstrated its potential to improve software development and evolution practices; various tools and research prototypes now exist for documenting architectural knowledge. However, capturing such knowledge is not enough: according to practitioners’ feedback, a certain amount of knowledge postprocessing is required to make the captured knowledge consumable and stimulate reuse. In our previous work, we created a method for enhancing knowledge about the past (decisions made) into architectural guidance for the future (decisions required). However, additional concepts are required to let our method benefits from recent advances in architectural knowledge management tool engineering. In this paper we establish requirements for post-processing architectural knowledge captured on projects and enhancing the knowledge into architectural guidance. The requirements are derived from literature and industrial experiences. Next, we analyze existing tools with respect to these requirements. Finally, we establish a vision for an integrated method and tooling for architectural guidance modeling and outline a roadmap for future research and tool development towards this vision. Keywords— Architectural knowledge; decision reuse; architectural synthesis; design guide; knowledge management tool