Treffer: Bridging the gap between software architecture rationale formalisms and actual architecture documents: an ontology-driven approach ; SCIENCE OF COMPUTER PROGRAMMING (PRINT) ; Sci. Comput. Program.

Documenting software architecture rationale is essential to reuse and evaluate architectures, and several modeling and documentation guidelines have been proposed in the literature. However, in practice creating and updating these documents rarely is a primary activity in most software projects, and rationale remains hidden in casual and semi-structured records, such as e-mails, meeting notes, wikis, and specialized documents. This paper describes the TREx (Toeska Rationale Extraction) approach to recover, represent and explore rationale information from text documents, combining: (1) pattern-based information extraction to recover rationale; (2) ontology-based representation of rationale and architectural concepts; and (3) facet-based interactive exploration of rationale. Initial results from TREx's application suggest that some kinds of architecture rationale can be semiautomatically extracted from a project's unstructured text documents, namely decisions, alternatives and requirements. The approach and some tools are illustrated with a case study of rationale recovery for a financial securities settlement system. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. ; This work was partially funded by FONDEF (project CONTEXTA D05110286), UTFSM (project DGIP 24.08.58), STIC-Amsud (project SECODE - Semantic Based Support for Collaborative Design), and NSERC (grant number 262148-05). ; 6 ; FONDEF ; clopez@inf.utfsm.cl; vcodocedo@inf.utfsm.cl; hernan@inf.utfsm.cl; cysneiro@yorku.ca ; FONDEF [CONTEXTA D05110286]; UTFSM [DGIP 24.08.58]; STIC-Amsud; NSERC [262148-05] ; FONDEF