Capturing and Maintaining Architectural Knowledge using Context Information

Approaches for sharing and reusing architectural knowledge (AK) have found some application in practice. Capturing AK during software design and development, however, is still a problem. Main reasons are the effort involved in capturing, as well as lack of time and budget, and lack of short-term benefits for the involved stakeholders. We propose using context information about currently modified artifacts, like time, existing relations, and user information, for automatically identifying and presenting relevant AK. The main aim is to simplify the use of AK during development by presenting a continuously updated context-relevant view on AK for currently viewed artifacts. This facilitates capturing and maintaining of relations among knowledge entities, updating existing entities, and finding relevant entities during architecture analysis and reviews. In this paper we present the main concepts of our approach, report on first experiences, and discuss future work.