Sustaining large open source development efforts requires recruiting new participants; however, a lack of architectural documentation might inhibit new participants since large amounts of project knowledge are unavailable to newcomers. We present the results of a multitrait, multimethod analysis of the effects of introducing architectural documentation into a substantial open source project-the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). HDFS had only minimal architectural documentation, and we wanted to discover whether the putative benefits of architectural documentation could be observed over time. To do this, we created and publicized an architecture document and then monitored its usage and effects on the project. The results were somewhat ambiguous: by some measures the architecture documentation appeared to effect the project but not by others. Perhaps of equal importance is our discovery that the project maintained, in its Web-accessible JIRA archive of software issues and fixes, enough architectural discussion to support architectural thinking and reasoning. This “emergent” architecture documentation served an important purpose in recording core project members' architectural concerns and resolutions. However, this emergent architecture documentation did not serve all project members equally well; it appears that those on the periphery of the project-newcomers and adopters-still require explicit architecture documentation, as we will show.

The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (GSWEBOK) is a good first step in characterizing the contents of the software engineering discipline and in providing a topical access to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK). However, the GSWEBOK is seriously lacking as a guide to how the SWEBOK can be used to explore system failures as a way of enhancing practitioner's preparations for the software engineering profession. This lack is not limited to the Guide. This is why it is very important, in order that software system failure may be understood from a software engineering point of view, that a new conception of what the SWEBOK is, as well as new approaches to its access, need to be developed.

This empirical research demonstrates the effectiveness of content analysis to map the research literature of the software engineering discipline. The results suggest that certain research themes in software engineering have remained constant, but with changing thrusts. Other themes have arisen, matured, and then faded as major research topics, while still others seem transient or immature. Co-word analysis is the specific technique used. This methodology identifies associations among publication descriptors (indexing terms) from the ACM Computing Classification System and produces networks of descriptors that reveal these underlying patterns. This methodology is applicable to other domains with a supporting corpus of textual data. While this study utilizes index terms from a fixed taxonomy, that restriction is not inherent; the descriptors can be generated from the corpus. Hence, co-word analysis and the supporting software tools employed here can provide unique insights into any discipline's evolution.