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European Conference on Software Architecture

ECSA 2016: Software Architecture pp 265–273Cite as

The Disappearance of Technical Specifications in Web and Mobile Applications

A Survey Among Professionals

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 9839))

Abstract

In recent years, we have been observing a paradigm shift in design and documentation practices for web and mobile applications. There is a trend towards fewer up-front design specification and more code and configuration-centric documentation. In this paper we present the results of a survey, conducted with professional software engineers who build web and mobile applications. Our focus was on understanding the role of software architecture in these applications, i.e. what is designed up-front and how; which parts of the architecture are reused from previous projects and what is the average lifetime of such applications. Among other things, the results indicate that free-text design specification is favored over the use of modeling languages like UML; architectural knowledge is primarily preserved through verbal communication between team members, and the average lifetime of web and mobile applications is between one and five years.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Because of space limitations, in this paper, we bundled two of our original research questions into one.

  2. 2.

    The term tool is used in a wide sense here, covering among others UML, free-text, but also conversations and informal whiteboard sketches.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. HAN University of Applied Sciences, Arnhem, The Netherlands

    Theo Theunissen & Uwe van Heesch

Authors
  1. Theo Theunissen
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  2. Uwe van Heesch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Theo Theunissen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wageningen University , Wageningen, The Netherlands

    Bedir Tekinerdogan

  2. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Uwe Zdun

  3. University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia

    Ali Babar

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© 2016 Springer International Publishing AG

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Theunissen, T., van Heesch, U. (2016). The Disappearance of Technical Specifications in Web and Mobile Applications. In: Tekinerdogan, B., Zdun, U., Babar, A. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9839. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48992-6_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48992-6_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-48991-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-48992-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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