A model for the recording and reuse of software design decisions and decision rationale

The reuse of software can be divided into four categories according to what is being reused: the reuse of program code, the reuse of design documents, the reuse of software processes, and the reuse of software design decisions and their results. In this paper, we regard software design discussions and their conclusions (i.e., design decisions and their rationale) as software design knowledge, and we describe the framework for a system for on-line, real-time recording of such knowledge and its reuse in software design. We also present an example that demonstrates the effectiveness of that framework