Exploring Architectural Design Decision Management Paradigms for Global Software Development

Global software development (GSD) is an increasing trend in the field of software engineering. It can be considered as coordinated activities of software development that are geographically and temporally distributed. The management of architectural knowledge, specifically, architectural design decisions (ADDs), becomes important in GSD due to the geographical, temporal, and cultural challenges in global environment. However, little work has be done on capturing, sharing, and evolving ADDs in a GSD context. Based on our previous work on ADD management in localized software development (LSD), we extend our study to explore ADD management paradigms for GSD in this paper. We propose three ADD management strategies for the distributed development environment, and according to global software project structures, we explore and analyze three typical ADD management paradigms that can be widely adopted in GSD. We aim to provide a fundamental framework on managing ADD documentation and evolution in GSD, and offer good insights into sharing and coordinating ADDs in a global setting. Keywords-architectural design decisions; global software development; architectural knowledge; documentation; evolution