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Making the Case for Centralized Software Architecture Management

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Software Quality. The Future of Systems- and Software Development (SWQD 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 238))

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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projects architectural knowledge often remains implicit and is not available for a particular system stakeholder or outdated when it is actually needed.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).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.sonarqube.org.

  2. 2.

    We should note that we were not able to move all features we had implemented in the original toolset to the reengineered version. For example, currently feature and design decision management are not part of the repository-based solution.

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Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has been partly supported by the Austrian Ministry for Transport, Innovation and Technology, the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy, and the Province of Upper Austria in the frame of the COMET center SCCH.

The authors would like to thank Hermann Lischka from Racon Software GmbH for supporting the project, and Gernot Binder, and Heinz Huber (also Racon Software GmbH) for their cooperation.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Software Competence Center Hagenberg, Hagenberg im Mühlkreis, Austria

    Georg Buchgeher

  2. Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria

    Rainer Weinreich

  3. Racon Software GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Thomas Kriechbaum

Authors
  1. Georg Buchgeher
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  2. Rainer Weinreich
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  3. Thomas Kriechbaum
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Georg Buchgeher .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Winkler

  2. Institute of Software Technology and Interactive Systems, Vienna University of Technology Inst. of S/W Tech. and Interactive Sys., Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  3. Software Quality Lab GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Johannes Bergsmann

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Buchgeher, G., Weinreich, R., Kriechbaum, T. (2016). Making the Case for Centralized Software Architecture Management. In: Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Bergsmann, J. (eds) Software Quality. The Future of Systems- and Software Development. SWQD 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 238. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27033-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27033-3_8

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27033-3

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