Design rationale and maintainability

Design decisions and assumptions that occur within and during the process of system design are not generally documented. The deliberation and much of the domain learning that went into resolving key design issues is thus wasted, increasing overall system costs. This cost is most apparent during maintenance, when a significant portion of engineer´s time is spent trying to recover the lost rationale of the system structure. An approach is proposed for capturing this process-oriented material during development, indexed so that it provides this critical information to maintainers