Name of the participant: Dominik Rost
Description of the IT-research project: In system design, architects break the system down into realisable individual parts, establish mechanisms for achieving functional and quality requirements and derive implementation tasks from these. The architecture documentation generated in the process serves developers as a basis for implementation. However, the views of architects and developers on the system differ fundamentally: architects take a holistic view of the system and therefore document globally. Developers have a local focus on the elements and concepts for whose implementation they are responsible. Comprehensive documentation, such as that created by architects in practice, does not take this difference into account and contains a lot of arguable information and conveys information in an unsuitable way. The result is an inefficient and error-prone architecture implementation, as developers first have to identify and then adapt to their specific context, which is a time-consuming process.
The central idea to meet these challenges is the development of an approach that enables the creation of architecture documentation for specific development tasks by individual developers. Such documentation should contain all relevant, but only a minimum of unneeded information and present information in a way that allows an efficient and error-free implementation. “Relevant information” includes a broad overview of the system basics, combined with a detailed consideration of the elements to be implemented and their context. A “suitable presentation” includes aspects such as the structure and sequence of the presented information, the tailoring of relevant architecture information, as well as the adaptation of information for the concrete context. In order to limit the necessary effort and thus achieve applicability in practice, techniques for fully automatic generation from general, complete architecture documentation are to be applied.
This will make it possible in future to implement software systems more efficiently and with higher quality.
Software Campus partners: Fraunhofer Verbund IuK-Technologie, Software AG
Implementation period:01.01.2013 – 31.12.2014
