Master's Thesis Oleksandra Klymenko

Automatic Documentation of Results During Online Architectural Meetings

Motivation

Every day, architects and developers meet to discuss the projects they are working on. Especially in big distributed projects, it is very common that such meetings happen online via conference tools. 

The main idea of this thesis is to develop a system that would support these people by automatically documenting the results of their meetings.

Among the main results of such meetings are the decisions, that were made during the meeting. Decision making is a very important aspect in software development and architecture and the need to explicitly document design decisions has been emphasized both in research and industry [1].  However, manual documentation takes a lot of time and effort and thus automatic design decision detection becomes highly advantageous.

Previous research has mostly focused on detecting decisions in issue management systems and source code commits. However, many decisions are implicitly made in online meetings. Automatically identifying decisions in online meetings could help to refer back to and review the decisions, made during a discussion. Moreover, the reflection, i.e. manual review of automatically detected decisions by participants, can help to challenge the thinking behind design reasoning [2]. Finally, an analysis of the identified decisions and corresponding reflection can provide more empirical evidence about how architects make design decisions. 

Research Questions

1. What are the requirements for the system that automatically detects design decisions in online meetings?  
2. How to identify, extract and document design decisions in online meetings?
3. How does documenting design decisions made in online meetings benefit architects?  

References

1. Bhat, Manoj, et al. "Automatic extraction of design decisions from issue management systems: a machine learning based approach." European Conference on Software Architecture. Springer, Cham, 2017
2. Razavian, Maryam, et al. "Reflective approach for software design decision making." Software Architectures (QRASA), 2016 Qualitative Reasoning about. IEEE, 2016.