Architectural Knowledge Management in Global Software Development: A Review

Architectural Knowledge Management (AKM) aims to coordinate the knowledge produced and used during architecting a software system. Managing architectural knowledge effectively is a task that becomes even more critical and complex when operating in a distributed environment. Thus, software architectural practices, processes, and tools that work in collocated software development don´t necessarily scale up in a distributed environment. In this paper, we perform a literature review that looks at AKM in a Global Software Development (GSD) context. We attempt to synthesize AKM concepts, practices, tools and challenges important in GSD. In order to provide a common understanding for the central concepts of AKM in GSD in an abstract way, we have created a metamodel which is based on our literature review. The metamodel defines a set of architecture knowledge and global software development entities and their relationships.