Architectural design decision knowledge management system

Abstract

The software systems typically fail and deviate from its prescriptive architecture due to various reasons such as incorrect architectural design, lack of experience and lack of domain knowledge. After precise software requirements are gathered from customers, those requirements should be converted into an appropriate design. Suppose if any inappropriate design is constructed from these requirements, it may cause to reconstruct the system implementation. So, a set of good architectural design decisions form a good system architecture and those architectural design decisions should be documented or stored as knowledge bases to use further. Various methodologies exist to store architectural design decisions and trace them. Most of them have some drawbacks such as lack of time to gather and store and additional cost to maintain such knowledge bases. As the key objective, this report proposes an ontological knowledge management system to solve above mentioned problems in software engineering industry for avoiding the extra costs to redevelop or refine the software system implementation. Though the implemented solution is ontology-based knowledge management system, it seems to be a simple web application to the end user. User-friendly web interfaces are implemented to store and retrieve the architectural design decisions, based on completed or already initiated software projects. Those design decisions would be useful for the professionals who design the effective software architecture designs. Finally, empirical and Likert questionnaires were conducted to prove that the implemented solution works perfectly as a solution for the stated problems and this report ends mentioning some limitations and future work with relevant to ontological knowledge management systems and its technologies.