Design rationale capture for process improvement in the globalised enterprise: an industrial study

Nkwocha, A.; Hall, Jon G. and Rapanotti, Lucia (2010). Design rationale capture for process improvement in the globalised enterprise: an industrial study. Technical Report 2010/06; Department of Computing, The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.000160a5

Abstract

Design rationale in software engineering fills in the gaps between the original requirements of a system and the finished product encompassing decisions, constraints and other information that influenced the outcome. Existing research in this field corroborates the importance of design rationale to capture knowledge assets, particularly in the context of the global enterprise, with its increased risk of knowledge loss through staff movement and attrition. Despite this, the practice of design rationale capture and reuse is not as extensive as could be expected due to reasons which include time and budget constraints and lack of standards and tools. In this paper we report on and industrial study which tested the hypothesis that an emerging design approach-Problem Oriented Engineeering-enables the capture of design rationale as the methodological by-product of software engineering activities, hence potentially addresses concerns over cost effectiveness of in situ design rationale capture.