Capturing architecture documentation navigation trails for content chunking and sharing

Navigating and understanding complex software architecture documentation is often challenging. To support finding relevant information in architecture documents (ADs), we propose a semi-automated approach based on the actual usage of ADs by previous users, i.e. by capturing users' exploration paths through ADs and making these paths available for future retracing and analysis. To do this, we have built a prototype tool (KaitoroCap) that captures users' AD exploration paths and saves them with contextual metadata. KaitoroCap displays the exploration paths in hierarchical tree-views and these exploration paths can be searched. This is helpful for recalling previous navigations and to follow others' useful paths in finding relevant information in AD. Our approach also enables dynamic restructuring of ADs and incorporates user rating, tagging and commenting of the content of ADs. Initial user evaluation shows promising results.