Exploring Web Search Engines to Find Architectural Knowledge
This addresses a practical problem for software engineers in making design decisions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing practices without introducing new methods.
The paper tackled the challenge of software engineers finding relevant architectural knowledge (AK) by empirically studying the effectiveness of web search engines like Google, revealing how effective they are and identifying sources and concepts of AK retrieved.
Software engineers need relevant and up-to-date architectural knowledge (AK), in order to make well-founded design decisions. However, finding such AK is quite challenging. One pragmatic approach is to search for AK on the web using traditional search engines (e.g. Google); this is common practice among software engineers. Still, we know very little about what AK is retrieved, from where, and how useful it is. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study with 53 software engineers, who used Google to make design decisions using the Attribute-Driven-Design method. Based on how the subjects assessed the nature and relevance of the retrieved results, we determined how effective web search engines are to find relevant architectural information. Moreover, we identified the different sources of AK on the web and their associated AK concepts.