A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

on a regular basis. Their inputs have provided insights into the practice of applying design
rationale. This chapter reports the findings of a survey of practising architects in the Asia
Pacific region. The findings of this survey have shed light on how design rationale are
used, documented, and perceived by designers and architects working in this region. 1 The
objectives of the study are:
• To understand the architects’ perceptions about architecture design rationale and the
importance of the different elements of design rationale (such as design constraints,
design strengths and weaknesses).
• To determine the frequency of documenting and reasoning with different elements
of design rationale, the main reasons for not documenting design rationale, and the
common methods, techniques, and tools used to document design rationale.
• To identify the potential challenges and opportunities for improving the use and
documentation of design rationale in practice.
During this study, we have encountered several interesting findings which enabled us
to identify a set of research questions for further investigations. Since a theory explaining
the attitude and behaviour toward the use of design rationale does not exist, this study
employs an inductive approach (i.e., using facts to develop general conclusions) as an
attempt to move toward such a theory.
The chapter makes three significant contributions to the Software Architecture (SA)
discipline:
• It presents the design and results of the first survey-based empirical study in architecture
design rationale practices.
• It provides information about how practitioners think about, reason with, document
and use design rationale.
• It identifies the problems and contradictions of current design rationale practices.
As a result, we propose a research agenda that aims to explore and enhance current
architecture design rationale practices.
We discuss the current approaches to using design rationale in Section 5.1. We present
our survey methodology in Section 5.2. Section 5.3 presents the results of the survey. A
discussion of our findings and their limitations are in Sections 5.4 and 5.5 respectively.
1 This chapter is based on our work published in [157, 158, 6]. Han, Ali Babar and Gorton have suggested
questions in the questionnaire and have contributed to the writing of the papers.
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