Task-Specific Architecture Documentation for Developers

Software architecture documentation often contains huge amounts of information. For developers, finding the right information for their implementation work can be challenging. This thesis presents an approach for the automated creation of architecture documentation that is specific for individual implementation tasks. With this, developers gain a more efficient and effective access to relevant architecture knowledge for their implementation work.

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Architecture documentation is essential for preserving knowledge and guiding the implementation in software development. For their implementation work, developers need detailed information from throughout the documentation. However, with regard to a single implementation task, architecture documentation contains mostly overhead information and relevant information is scattered. This makes information retrieval inefficient and error-prone and consequently affects implementation work. This thesis provides an approach for tailoring architecture documentation to individual implementation tasks, containing all relevant, but no overhead information, and presenting it concretely and centralized. As key contribution, this thesis provides a set of formalized creation rules, which defines the synthesis of task-specific architecture documentation. A tool prototype automates this process to make it economically feasible. To ensure applicability in practice, possible integration points in typical software development processes are described. The validation of the approach indicates the positive effects for the efficiency and accuracy of architecture information retrieval for developers.