Towards Software Architecture Documents Matching Stakeholders’ Interests

Abstract

Architecture documentation is a crucial activity in any software development project. In practice, architecture documenters face two problems: how to generate relevant documentation contents for the main stakeholders, and how to avoid documenting too much about the architecture. We propose a personalization approach based on stakeholders’ interests to tackle these problems. The expected contribution is to facilitate the documenter’s tasks, while making the resulting documentation useful to the stakeholders. We specifically describe a user profiling tool that builds stakeholders’ profiles, which serve to link the stakeholders to sections of the architectural documents. These links help the documenter to prioritize sections that are potentially relevant to those stakeholders. The tool has been implemented as a semi-automated pipeline based on text mining techniques. The results, although preliminary, show that our proposal is helpful for a stakeholder-centric architecture documentation process.