Yes I know, it is a bit late. However, I am still very pleased that the paper Preparing for a Literature Survey of Software Architecture using Formal Concept Analysis by L. Couto, J.N. Oliveira, M.A. Ferreira and E. Bouwers has been accepted (and presented) at the Fifth International Workshop on Software Quality and Maintainability!
The abstract:
The scientific literature on Software Architecture(SA) is extensive and dense. With no preparation, surveying this literature can be a daunting task for novices in the field. This paper resorts to the technique of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) in organizing and structuring such a body of knowledge. We start by surveying a set of 38 papers bearing in mind the following questions: “What are the most supported definitions of software architecture?”, “What are the most popular research topics in software architecture?”, “What are the most relevant quality attributes of a software architecture?” and “What are the topics that researchers point out as being more interesting to explore in the future?”. To answer these questions we classify each paper with appropriate keywords and apply FCA to such a classification. FCA allows us to structure our survey in the form of lattices of concepts which give evidence of main relationships involved. We believe our results will help in guiding a more comprehensive, in-depth study of the field, to be carried out in the future.
