Decision-based software development: design and maintenance

A software maintenance task comprises the activities of understanding, assessment, analysis, realization and verification of the required changes. A decision-based software development methodology in which the various software objects are related by the decisions in which they are involved, is proposed. A decision relates a problem to its solution, gives alternate solutions which were considered and justifies the particular solution chosen. A decision or related set of decisions, provides a view of the software system relevant to that decision and allows the retrieval of source code which resulted from that decision. The design of D-HyperCase, a prototype decision-based software development support system, is described. Since this system is being developed using the decision-based approach, development experiences are discussed