A Task-Oriented Navigation Approach to Enhance Architectural Description Comprehension

The way to document architecture is called Architecture Description (AD). It contains all the key design decisions, presents how the system is composed, specifies the interface of the component, and etc. Such information is needed not only during the whole development but also in the system maintenance or evolvement phase. Meanwhile, the amount of the various ADs in a modern software system becomes very large and the content of ADs is also richer. To understand the system ADs becomes challenging to the engineers. However, past research in the software engineering area did not pay enough attention to assisting the engineers to understand the ADs. On the other hand, according to the document navigation research in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), the engineer´s intention should be adequately presented. To address these issues, we proposed a Task-oriented Navigation Approach and developed a tool support. By specifying tasks that express the purpose of the engineer, our approach generates the organized information, trims the irrelevant descriptions, and guides the navigation sequentially. Our approach provides several major benefits. First, it offers an approach to capture the purpose of the engineer. Second, it reminds the engineer about the possible omission during the reading. Last, it improves the understandability of the AD and reduces the workload of the engineer.