How Do Developers Search for Architectural Information? An Industrial Survey
Musengamana Jean de Dieu, Peng Liang, Mojtaba Shahin

TL;DR
This survey investigates how developers search for architectural information, highlighting common purposes, challenges faced, and providing insights for future tool development and practical guidelines.
Contribution
It is the first comprehensive industrial survey focusing specifically on architectural information search activities among developers.
Findings
Developers frequently seek architectural info to compare solutions and make decisions.
Difficulty in finding relevant info for quality concerns and design choices.
Major challenges include time consumption and information overload.
Abstract
Building software systems often requires knowledge and skills beyond what developers already possess. In such cases, developers have to leverage different sources of information to seek help. A growing number of researchers and practitioners have started investigating what programming-related information developers seek during software development. However, being a high level and a type of the most important development-related information, architectural information search activity is seldom explored. To fill this gap, we conducted an industrial survey completed by 103 participants to understand how developers search for architectural information to solve their architectural problems in development. Our main findings are: (1) searching for architectural information to learn about the pros and cons of certain architectural solutions (e.g., patterns, tactics) and to make an architecture…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Research · Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies · Software Engineering Techniques and Practices
