Despite the challenges to the capture of rationale discussed in Sect. 1.5, there are also specific contexts in SE where the benefits of rationale capture could outweigh the costs. Below we list four contexts suitable for the four categories of …
In addition to supporting rationale tasks, an RMS must deal with the limitations discussed in Sect. 1.5. In particular, strategic decisions made during the rationale goal definition and rationale identification tasks can significantly impact the selection and tailoring of the …
full ideas and rationale from the past, but also a matter of preserving records of what not to do. There is no point in reinventing the wheel, but it makes even less sense to reinvent the square wheel. Thus, the …
Despite the many approaches to DR suggested and the many software systems devised, DR has not found ongoing use in real-world design. There are cases where DR has been applied successfully; but these often depend on special circumstances, such as …
Traditionally, DR literature has emphasized that devising the right schema, i.e., one that captures the right information and structures it correctly, is the way to solve the problems of DRR usage. Yet designers’ resistance to DR capture exists regardless of …
The most commonly mentioned reason for using DR in SE is to support future changes in software, a problem that is perhaps more pressing in this field than in any other design or engineering field. This does not necessarily require …
Often it is only by making rationale explicit that consistency can be achieved. For example, it is not uncommon in large projects for the same decision tasks to be done by different groups within the design team. Recording rationale makes …
DR can be used to promote both collaborative and participatory design. Rittel argued that participation by users in design is often inhibited because they do not understand what rationale designers are using, what questions they are addressing, what alternative answers …
DR can help to coordinate many aspects of a design team’s work. Different members of a team can use a common repository of DR to understand what others in the team are doing and what the consequences are for their …
Gruber and Russell [23] argue that argumentative schemas do not include all the rationale that designers use, because all of them are prescriptive about what information is relevant. No collection of DR, they claim, could answer all of the questions …
