Architectural Knowledge Sharing

Prerequisites for Successful Architectural Knowledge (AK) Sharing
(Rik Farenhorst, Patricia Lago and Hans van Vliet)

Architectural knowledge not shared eventually dissipates. Sharing:

• Prevents loss of crucial architectural knowledge.
• Enables exchange of experiences.
• Enables reuse of expertise.
• Assists to train juniors.

Not so popular because:

• Costs time and effort.
• Lack of perceived short-term benefits.

People need to be motivated - incentives - to make them aware of intrinsic benefits and to induce people to share AK. Incentives for AK sharing:

1. Establishment of social ties - leading to increased transparency and trust.
2. More efficient decision making.
3. Knowledge internalisation - ownership of explicit knowledge; control, stored in own mind.

Study at large software development organisations identified four angles that need to be activated:

1. Context and environment.
2. Description.
   
3. Decisiveness.
4. Stakeholders roles and responsibilities.

Observed issues with AK sharing:

1. Lack of consistency between architecture and design documents.
2. Communication overhead between stakeholders - not properly-documented decisions.
3. No explicit collaboration with maintenance teams.
4. No feedback from developers to architects - architects may lack up-to-date technology knowledge.
5. No up-tp-date knowledge from development teams in repository.
6. No up-to-date knowledge from main customer in repository - reference architecture used by organisation.

Prerequisites for AK sharing:

1. Alignment between design artifacts -> [create] higher-quality knowledge -> [incentive] knowledge internalisation.
2. Traceability between architectural decisions and descriptions -> [as above].
3. Architect fulfil a central role -> minimise competition -> establishment of social ties.
4. Central architectural knowledge repository -> creates feedback loop -> more efficient decision making.

Goal: Effective tool support for AK sharing - close alignment to architecting process; lightweight and appealing to users. Solution: AK sharing platform that features explicit focus on collaboration, hybrid AK model (codification and personalisation), reuse of best practices, expertise, easy adding and editing. For AK that is hard to make explicit: Who has what AK? - 'yellow pages' and store unstructured information - blogs, discussion groups - searching and enriching this information.