Towards the essentials of architecture documentation for avoiding architecture erosion

Software architecture documentation is essential for preventing architecture erosion that is a major concern of sustainable software systems. However, the high effort for elaboration and maintenance of architecture documentation hinders its acceptance in practice. Most state-of-the-art research methods assume comprehensive architecture documentation. By reducing architecture documentation to those aspects that are most important for architecture erosion, we want to achieve more acceptance for architecture documentation especially in agile projects. This reduction, however, has effects on architecture-related activities during software design and implementation.