Towards a reduction in architectural knowledge vaporization during agile global software development

Abstract

Abstract Context The adoption of agile methods is a trend in global software development (GSD), but may result in many challenges. One important challenge is architectural knowledge (AK) management, since agile developers prefer sharing knowledge through face-to-face interactions, while in GSD the preferred manner is documents. Agile knowledge-sharing practices tend to predominate in GSD companies that practice agile development (AGSD), leading to a lack of documents, such as architectural designs, data models, deployment specifications, etc., resulting in the loss of AK over time, i.e., it vaporizes. Objective In a previous study, we found that there is important AK in the log files of unstructured textual electronic media (UTEM), such as instant messengers, emails, forums, etc., which are the preferred means employed in AGSD to contact remote teammates. The objective of this paper is to present and evaluate a proposal with which to recover AK from UTEM logs. We developed and evaluated a prototype that implements our proposal in order to determine its feasibility. Method The evaluation was performed by conducting a study with agile/global developers and students, who used the prototype and different UTEM to execute tasks that emulate common situations concerning AGSD teams’ lack of documentation during development phases. Results Our prototype was considered a useful, usable and unobtrusive tool when retrieving AK from UTEM logs. The participants also preferred our prototype when searching for AK and found AK faster with the prototype than with UTEM when the origin of the AK required was unknown. Conclusion The participants’ performance and perceptions when using our prototype provided evidence that our proposal could reduce AK vaporization in AGSD environments. These results encourage us to evaluate our proposal in a long-term test as future work.