Towards enabling design rationale capture by asking the right questions

Abstract

Over the last thirty years many research has been conducted to capture the ”how” and ”why” behind design decisions. This information is known as design rationales (DR). Approaches to capture, store, preserve, and use DR have emerged from research activities. However, as of today they only found exceptional application within industrial practice. Rationales have been analysed in respect to its nature, its structure, and its quality. Additionally, some researchers performed analyses on them. They found out that DR have the potential to sustainably contribute to design, re-design, testing, maintenance, and improving product quality over the whole product-life cycle. Within this paper a research proposal is presented striving to tackle the exceptional use of DR in software documentation. We want to promote the capture of DR by paying more attention on the questions ”What information has to be captured by rationales?”, ”How detailed should the captured information be?”, and ”How should rationale capture be integrated into the development process?”. It is the goal to promote the use of DR within the whole software development process. In short, within this paper we introduce the topic of DR, related research and elaborate on the intended research on the topic of DR capture.