Successful Architectural Knowledge Sharing: Beware of Emotions

Eltjo Poort, Agung Pramono, Michiel Perdeck, Viktor Clerc, Hans van Vliet, 5th International Conference on the Quality of Software Architectures, QoSA 2009, East Stroudsburg, PA, USA, June 24-26, 2009, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 5581 Springer 2009, ISBN 978-3-642-02350-7

This paper presents the analysis and key findings of a survey on architectural knowledge sharing. The responses of 97 architects working in the Dutch IT Industry were analyzed by correlating practices and challenges with project size and success. Impact mechanisms between project size, project success, and architectural knowledge sharing practices and challenges were deduced based on reasoning, experience and literature. We find that architects run into numerous and diverse challenges sharing architectural knowledge, but that the only challenges that have a significant impact are the emotional challenges related to interpersonal relationships. Thus, architects should be careful when dealing with emotions in knowledge sharing.

Official link

This paper appears as chapter 7 in Improving Solution Architecting Practices