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.