Personalized architectural documentation based on stakeholders’ information needs

Abstract

The stakeholders of a software system are, to a greater or lesser extent, concerned about its software architecture, as an essential artifact for capturing the key design decisions of the system. The architecture is normally documented in the Software Architecture Document (SAD), which tends to be a large and complex technical description, and does not always address the information needs of every stakeholder. Individual stakeholders are interested in different, sometimes overlapping, subsets of the SAD and they also require varying levels of detail. As a consequence, stakeholders are affected by an information overload problem, which in practice discourages the usage of the architectural knowledge and diminishes its value for the organization.