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A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

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1.2. Research motivations and research questions<br />

• the argumentation-<strong>based</strong> design rationale systems do not effectively capture and<br />

communicate design reasoning;<br />

• some of the design rationale methods are not practical in the industry setting because<br />

they do not work effectively with the development process;<br />

• practitioners are not aware of the benefits to explicitly justify and capture design decisions,<br />

so they continue the traditional design practice without an explicit reasoning<br />

process;<br />

• lack of methodology and tool support.<br />

If design rationale is not used systematically, and architects continue to practise unstructured<br />

decision-making instead of an objective and verifiable reasoning process [156],<br />

a number of issues may arise:<br />

• architects may not have considered all the factors that influence a design, resulting<br />

in a system with inferior quality;<br />

• architecture decisions do not have to be justified in an objective way, there<strong>for</strong>e the<br />

argumentation, analysis and tradeoffs about a decision could be incomplete or biased;<br />

• the verification of the architecture design remain a subjective exercise and its quality<br />

assurance ability questionable;<br />

• the reasoning of the architecture decisions is not systematically captured and can<br />

“evaporate” over time;<br />

• change impact analysis during architecture design maintenance requires reasoning<br />

support and the lack of such knowledge can lead to difficulties in understanding and<br />

maintaining a system;<br />

• unstructured design rationalisation may cause difficulties in future system enhancements<br />

such that a minor change in requirement may cause a major architecture<br />

design change, there<strong>for</strong>e increases the risks and costs of a project inproportionally.<br />

These are fundamental issues which have not been studied in detail and they relate<br />

primarily to architecture design rationale. Thus, we need to study the use and documentation<br />

of architecture design rationale. In the next section, we discuss the related research<br />

questions and the research approaches.<br />

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