A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

Chapter 2
An industry’s perspective of
design rationale in software
engineering
Designers working in the software industry often use intuition and experience to rationalise
their design decisions. Their design reasoning are generally carried out implicitly. The
drawback of such an implicit approach is that the quality of decisions would heavily depend
on the experience and expertise of the individuals. It has been established that design
rationale play an important role in the design decision making process [33, 12], it would
be useful to ascertain if the software industry adopts a structured and effective design
rationalisation process and if they capture and manage design rationale.
There are a number of methods that offer design reasoning support, examples are
ATAM [8], CBAM [4], View and Beyond [23], Use Case Driven Software Development [33]
and SeURAT [14]. However, it seems that they have not been adopted by the software
industry generally. The lack of guidance in design decision making means that personal
experience plays a large role in design activities. Hence, designers with less experience
could make less than optimal or even erroneous design decisions. This could be one of the
reasons why the success of projects are related to the capabilities of technical personnel
[74].
In this chapter, we examine the software industry practice of design. We discuss
architecture design methodologies and how they make use of design rationale. Finally, we
discuss the implications of lacking design rationale to enterprise systems.
11