Abstract
In recent years, we have been observing a paradigm shift in design and documentation practices for web and mobile applications. There is a trend towards fewer up-front design specification and more code and configuration-centric documentation. In this paper we present the results of a survey, conducted with professional software engineers who build web and mobile applications. Our focus was on understanding the role of software architecture in these applications, i.e. what is designed up-front and how; which parts of the architecture are reused from previous projects and what is the average lifetime of such applications. Among other things, the results indicate that free-text design specification is favored over the use of modeling languages like UML; architectural knowledge is primarily preserved through verbal communication between team members, and the average lifetime of web and mobile applications is between one and five years.
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