A value-based approach for documenting design decisions rationale: a replicated experiment

The explicit documentation of the rationale of design decisions is a practice generally encouraged but rarely implemented in industry because of a variety of inhibitors. Known methods for Design Decisions Rationale Documentation (DDRD) are aimed to maximize the benefits for practitioners who should utilize the DDRD by imposing the burden on the developers of documenting all the potentially useful information. In our view, the adoption of a tailored DDRD, consisting only of the required set of information, would mitigate the effects of DDRD inhibitors. This paper focuses on confirming empirically the feasibility of a valuebased approach for documenting the rationale behind design decisions, and the importance of different DDRD information categories. In this context, this work describes a replicated experiment carried out at the University Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid (Spain) aimed to validate previous results from an analogous study conducted at the University of Roma Tor Vergata (Italy)...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ICSE
• Authors: Davide Falessi, Rafael Capilla, Giovanni Cantone
• Keywords: Decisions Rationale Documentation, Design Decisions, ICSE 2008, Keywords Design Rationale, Software Engineering