Proceedings of the 2010 ICSE Workshop on Sharing and Reusing Architectural Knowledge

Abstract

The SHARK workshop focuses on current and emerging methods, languages, notations, technologies and tools to create, extract, represent, share, use and re-use architectural knowledge. Architectural Knowledge (AK) is the integrated representation of the software architecture of a software-intensive system (or a family of systems), including the architectural design decisions, and the external context/environment. It is increasingly recognized as the means for architecture governance; it facilitates and supports collaboration and the transfer of expertise. Architectural knowledge has been established within the software architecture community as a self-contained research area in software architecture, and brought along some promising research directions. In this workshop we discuss the issues that lead to the application of architectural knowledge in research and industrial practice; ongoing research and new ideas to advance the field. In its four previous editions we examined: the state of the art and practice (2006), future challenges and trends (2007), architectural knowledge as perceived by different research communities, including requirements engineering, service-oriented computing and international standardization (2008), and the application, experimentation, specialization and use of architectural knowledge theory and approaches (2009). In this fifth SHARK edition we've asked the community to discuss and contribute on how to reorganize and codify the Body of Knowledge of the WICSA community (WICSA BOK). This is partially available through www.softwarearchitectureportal.org and www.wicsa.net, but it needs to be reorganized and unified. We see two broad objectives for this activity: (1) to codify the BOK in the way the potential users (i.e., the members of the architecture community) would like to see it; and (2) exploit Web 2.0 and social networking techniques to support AK sharing, and better reachability/usability (again) according to the actual needs of the community itself. SHARK contributions offer new ideas and R&D results to shape the next generation of the WICSA BOK (www.softwarearchitectureportal.org).