Architectural Knowledge for Technology Decisions in Developer Communities: An Exploratory Study with StackOverflow

Architectural decisions have a big influence on basic properties of a software system, and are difficult to change once implemented. Technology decisions deserve special attention because they are one of the most frequently occurring types of architectural decisions. Architectural knowledge is crucial for good decisions. Current architecture knowledge management approaches try to support architects by offering a rich base of architectural solutions and design decision rules. However, they mostly depend on manually capturing and maintaining the architectural knowledge. In this paper, we utilize the most popular online software development community (StackOverflow) as a source of knowledge for technology decisions to support architecture knowledge management approaches with a more efficient methods for knowledge capturing. We conducted an exploratory study, and followed a qualitative and quantitative content analysis approach. We analysed the posts in this community to identify architecture-relevant and technology-related knowledge, and to classify the posts into different types for the purpose of knowledge structuring. In addition, we evaluated our findings through feedback from practitioners.