Architectural Knowlege Management Strategies: Approaches in Research and Industry

Abstract

The software architecture community has recently gained an increasing interest in managing architectural knowledge. However, up until now there have been no attempts to obtain an overview of the work in the field. In this paper we present a preliminary review on current approaches to architectural knowledge management. To this end, we compare approaches known from literature and encountered in industry with knowledge management theory. We found that in reports from research and practice there appears to be a preference to use the codification strategy. However, our observations of the software architecture industry show that organizations in general tend to use a personalization strategy unintentionally. This paper serves as a call for awareness of this gap between intention and reality, and questions the biased focus on intentional codification alone. We suggest to close this gap through focusing on hybrid approaches.