Software architecture documentation for developers: a survey

Authors:
Dominik Rost;Matthias Naab;Crescencio Lima;Christina von Flach Garcia Chavez
Affiliations:
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Fraunhofer Project Center on Software and Systems Engineering Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Bahia, Bahia, Brazil;Fraunhofer Project Center on Software and Systems Engineering Software Engineering Laboratory, Department of Computer Science, Federal University of Bahia, Bahia, Brazil
Venue:
ECSA'13 Proceedings of the 7th European conference on Software Architecture
Year:
2013

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Abstract

Software architecture has become an established discipline in industry. Nevertheless, the available documentation of architecture is often not perceived as adequate by developers. As a foundation for the improvement of methods and tools around architecture documentation, we conducted a survey with 147 industrial participants, investigating their current problems and wishes for the future. Participants from different countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America shared their experiences. This paper presents the results of the survey. The results confirmed the common belief that architecture documentation is most frequently outdated and inconsistent and backed it up with data. Further, developers perceive difficulties with a "one-size-fits-all" architecture documentation, which does not adequately provide information for their specific task and context. Developers seek for more interactive ways of working with architecture documentation that allow finding needed information more easily with extended navigation and search possibilities.