Zeitschriftenartikel
Continuous Rationale Management
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Datum
2024
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Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.
Zusammenfassung
Software developers continuously make decisions on the requirements and design of the software or the development process. They establish decision knowl edge, which they need to document and share so that it supports the evolution of the software. The man agement of decision knowledge is called rationale management. Rationale management has many positive effects, such as improved decision-making and change processes, knowledge sharing, reuse, and ac countability. However, rationale management is not well integrated. Problems of rationale management are threefold: First, documenting decision knowledge is intrusive in the development process and an additional effort. Second, the high amount of distributed knowledge documentation is difficult to access and use. Third, the documented knowledge can be of low quality, e.g., outdated, which impedes its use. The dissertation contributes a validated approach for continuous rationale management consisting of the ConRat life cycle model extension and the ConDec tool support. To reduce additional effort, ConDec integrates into standard development tools as plug-ins instead of providing a separate tool. ConDec enables lightweight capturing and use of decision knowledge from various software artifacts and reduces the developers’ effort through automatic text classification, recommendation, and nudging mechanisms for rationale management. To operationalize high quality, ConDec introduces the rationale backlog, the definition of done for knowledge documentation, and metrics for intra rationale completeness and decision coverage of re quirements and code. The dissertation shows the feasibility, effectiveness, and user acceptance of ConRat and ConDec in six case study projects in an industrial setting. Besides, it comprehensively analyses the rationale documentation created in the projects. The validation indicates that ConRat and ConDec benefit software development projects. Based on the dissertation, continuous rationale management should be come a standard part of agile software engineering, like automated testing or continuous integration.