The loss of architectural knowledge during system evolution: An industrial case study

Architecture defines the components of a system and their dependencies. The knowledge about how the architecture is intended to be implemented is essential to keep the system structure coherent and thereby comprehensible. In practice, this architectural knowledge is explicitly formulated only in the documentation (if at all), which usually gets outdated very soon. This leads to a growing amount of implicit knowledge during evolution that is especially volatile in projects with high developer fluctuation.

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