Automated capture and retrieval of architectural rationale

The Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) was developed at the Software Engineering Institute in the mid-90's and has been effective in helping industrial projects to uncover a shared understanding of the high-level organization of large software systems as well as to reveal how that structure is impacted by suggested changes to system requirements. In the MORALE project at Georgia Tech, we are further investigating the potential for a process such as SAAM to capture the architectural rationale of an evolving software project. One of the features of SAAM is that it is a people-oriented process. Yet this creates difficulties in keeping track of the very rich discussions on system organization and change. In this paper, we present the use of ubiquitous computing technology to augment the conventional SAAM process through automated capture, integration and access to the architectural discussions and artifacts produced by a SAAM session.