Towards architectural knowledge management practices for global software development

Abstract

In the past few years, an increasing interest in architectural knowledge is recognized in the software architecture community. Architectural knowledge is generally regarded as important to guide the development of software systems. With the trend of Global Software Development (GSD), the management of architectural knowledge becomes even more important due to the geographical, temporal, and socio-cultural distance innate to GSD. In this paper we build on the requirements engineering discipline to identify practices that can aid in overcoming GSD challenges and assess their applicability for management of architectural knowledge in a GSD setting. We provide a light-weight pattern language that we use to describe architectural knowledge management practices and provide a first validation of these practices from an ongoing case study.