Producing Just Enough Documentation: The Next SAD Version Problem

JORGE ANDRES DIAZ PACE; MATÍAS NICOLETTI; SILVIA SCHIAFFINO; SANTIAGO VIDAL

Simposio; SSBSE 2014 - Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering; 2014

Software architecture knowledge is an important asset in today?sprojects, as it serves to share the main design decisions among theproject stakeholders. Architectural knowledge is commonly captured bythe Software Architecture Document (SAD), an artifact that is usefulbut can also be costly to produce and maintain. In practice, the SADoften fails to fulfill its mission of addressing the stakeholders? informationneeds, due to factors such as: detailed or high-level contents thatdo not consider all stakeholders, outdated documentation, or documentationgenerated late in the lifecycle, among others. To alleviate thisproblem, we propose a documentation strategy that seeks to balance thestakeholders? interests in the SAD against the efforts of producing it.Our strategy is cast as an optimization problem called "the next SADversion problem? (NSVP) and several search-based techniques for it arediscussed. A preliminary evaluation of our approach has shown its potentialfor exploring cost-benefit tradeoffs in documentation production.