The paper titled “Architectural Views: The State of Practice in Open-Source Software Projects”, based on the STLab master thesis of Sofia Migliorini, has been awarded with the Best Paper award at the 18th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA, Rank A).
The paper and thesis work was born from the collaboration between the Software Technologies Laboratory (STLab) and the Software and Sustainability group (S2Group) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
The paper investigates the current practice of architectural views in open-source projects, focusing on their creation and editing history, representation, and purpose. The research involves a comprehensive study of 15k architectural views, revealing that most projects use a single, often informal view, which is rarely updated and maintained by one “architect” contributor. A statistically-relevant sample of 373 views is manually analyzed, showing that views mostly use an informal colored ad hoc notation, that often lacks a supporting legend. Deployment and control flow are the most common viewpoints, addressing concerns related to software maintainability and functional suitability. The study concludes creating versionable, templateable, and easily editable views could improve the practice of documenting software architectures in collaborative environments.
Congratulations to Sofia for her outstanding Master thesis work, and the whole team for the research recognition.
The full paper and presentation slides are available at the following links:
