Rationale management tool for software engineering

Abstract

In every software engineering project, large number of decisions is taken over an extended period of time and huge amount of knowledge is generated during these events. Rationale is the justification behind decisions. It is captured and used in many different forms during software engineering. While it has not achieved widespread use in practice, several approaches have emerged and successfully been used in selected projects Knowledge refers to the design specification and the technical aspect of the project. It is normally stored in the form of functional specification document or the design specification document. It is essential for us to document the rationale behind these decisions and knowledge gained during rationale analysis. In doing so, it would better facilitate us later in the development. Moreover, quality of decisions made will be improved, design and maintenance support will be better, repetitive evaluation of alternatives will be reduced. Furthermore, Newcomers to the project can learn the design within a short time by reviewing the decisions that produced it. This will help to save cost and time of the project. Rationale Management Tool is the software designed by me for tracking decision making during the design process. Having a process for documenting the rationale for design decisions can help in quality control and in providing useful information to people who may seek to reuse solutions. A number of tools and approaches have been developed in the past to facilitate rationale management. The main approaches to rationale management are described as a prelude to examining the features of an organizational analysis prototype. The unique feature of this prototype is that it embeds rationale management into a more general analysis and solution selection tool. The tool facilitates a number of mechanisms for the automated collection of relevant data. The paper studies on design rationale analysis and the implementation of the Rationale Management Tool. The tool has the ability to store the knowledge of the software engineering process as well as the rationale generated during the process.