A Rationale-based Model for Architecture Design Reasoning

5.6. Summary
5.6 Summary
The survey has gathered invaluable information about how designers use design rationale,
through which we have gained important insights into the issues of design rationale use and
documentation in the software industry. We found that practitioners see design rationale
as important. When design rationale are available, they use design rationale to support
maintenance and impact analysis. However, the level of documentation and the use of
design rationale are lower than the perception of its importance. We found that architects
have many roles and some of them are high-level planning and management. Architects
who take on these roles might have other perspectives and considerations in their decision
making in addition to technical considerations. Although risk assessment is something
that architects view as important, there is no consensus as to what is an acceptable level
of risk in architecture design. Respondents reported that there is a lack of methodology
and tool support for the capture and application of design rationale.
Using the results of the survey, we have established the need for using design rationale
in system design and maintenance activities. We have identified a number of areas for
further investigations: (a) establish an architecture rationale representation that could
effectively capture and communicate design reasoning; (b) provide the associated methods
to support effective traceability of design reasoning in impact analysis; (c) provide a quantitative
method to assess the risks or probabilities of change impacts in an architecture
design. These works are described in the following chapters.
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