Making the case for centralized software architecture management

Abstract

Architectural knowledge is an important artifact for many software development and quality control activities. Examples for quality control activities based on architectural information are architecture reviews, dependency analyses, and conformance analyses. Architecture is also an important artifact for understanding, reuse, evolution, and maintenance. Unfortunately, in many projects architectural knowledge often remains implicit and is not available for a particular system stakeholder or outdated when it is actually needed. To address this problem, we propose to manage semi-formal software architecture knowledge in a central repository, where it is accessible to all stakeholders and where it can be automatically and continuously updated and analyzed by different tools. In this paper we discuss important elements and use cases of such an approach, and present an example for an architecture knowledge and information repository in the context of an enterprise service-oriented architecture (SOA).