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Documentation is an important mechanism for disseminating software architecture knowledge. Software project teams can employ vastly different formats for documenting software architecture, from unstructured narratives to standardized documents. We explored to what extent this documentation format may matter to newcomers joining a software project and attempting to understand its architecture. We conducted a controlled questionnaire-based study wherein we asked 65 participants to answer software architecture understanding questions using one of two randomly-assigned documentation formats: narrative essays, and structured documents. We analyzed the factors associated with answer quality using a Bayesian ordered categorical regression and observed no significant association between the format of architecture documentation and performance on architecture understanding tasks. Instead, prior …