Capturing and managing decision making rationale

Rationale management is a technique for tracking decision making during the design process. Having a process for documenting the rationale for design decisions can help in quality control and in providing useful information to people who may seek to reuse solutions. A number of tools and approaches have been developed in the past to facilitate rationale management. The main approaches to rationale management are described as a prelude to examining the features of an organizational analysis prototype. The unique feature of this prototype is that it embeds rationale management into a more general analysis and solution selection tool. The tool facilitates a number of mechanisms for the automated collection of relevant data.