Open source based tools for sharing and reuse of software architectural knowledge

Sharing and reuse of software architectural knowledge (SHARK) has become an emerging topic of discussion and research in the field of software architecture development. SHARK is efficient with tool support, particularly so when that support is appropriate. However, there seems to be little guidance for selecting a suitable SHARK tool for use in an organization. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we present an evaluation framework that can be used for presenting an overview of SHARK tool features or comparing their differences. Secondly, we use the presented framework to evaluate three publicly available SHARK tools. The evaluated tools are the following: WebOfPatterns, Stylebase for Eclipse and PAKME.