SAIN: A Community-Wide Software Architecture INfrastructure.

Software Architecture is the most important determinant of the functional and non-functional attributes of a system [1]--[3]. Put simply, software systems "live and die" by their architectures [4]. Despite the importance, the architecture of a software system is often not explicitly documented, especially in the prevalent Agile methods in the past decades. Instead, the architecture of a system often becomes hidden in the myriad system implementation details, and gradually decays and accumulates grime---causing significant challenges to its long-term evolution and maintenance [5]--[8]. Recovering, understanding, and updating a system's architecture is an important facet of overcoming this challenge to support the evolution and maintenance of long-lived software systems. Responding to the above challenge, software architecture research has yielded many different tools and techniques in the past two decades. However, the disjoint research effort and diverse lab environments where different tools and techniques are created have impeded technology transfer for reproducible empirical studies for the community. In other words, there is a lack of shared infrastructure with available tools and datasets for systematic synthesis and empirical validation of new or existing techniques. As such, researchers and practitioners in need of cutting-edge tools tend to re-invent, re-implement research infrastructure, or ignore particular research avenues altogether.