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 own work. This can promote the identification of both potential conflicts between team members and …
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 that might be raised about the rationale for an artifact. Rather than having designers elicit …
Problem-Based Evaluation Lewis et al. [37] present a novel approach for evaluating alternative features of an artifact. They describe their own software design process as using a suite of problems for conceptual evaluation of different proposals for a computational environment they devised. Their experiences may sound familiar to other software designers, and yet no other …
The most commonly used way of treating DR is as a type of argumentation that is structured according to a given schema. There are many ways in which DR argumentation might be structured, but there have historically been two major branches of thought. One branch uses some variant of the schema for argument structure devised …
Three related approaches to argumentation – IBIS, QOC, and DRL Read More »
There are already many different approaches to DR, and more are coming into existence on a regular basis. This multiplicity of approaches shows that the DR field is healthy, but it also creates the need to make sense of this variety by finding organizing principles. In this section, we will therefore look at some ways …
Systematic documentation of rationale for practical decisions began more than 35 years ago with work on rationale for design [30], in particular, design of buildings and cities. In the 1980s, interest in rationale spread to other fields involved with design, including SE and mechanical engineering. In recent years, researchers in SE have begun to look …
