subject predicate object context
sdr Subject software engineering and design
sdr type Project
sdr label Software Design Rationale
sdr depiction CRC SoftwareDesignRationale logo.jpg
sdr name Software Design Rationale
sdr alternative label SDR
sdr Description Design Rationale research is concerned with developing effective methods and computer-supported representations for capturing, maintaining and re-using records of why designers have made the decisions they have. Possibly the critical challenge is to negotiate the capture bottleneck: how do we make the effort of recording rationale pay off not only for people trying to understand the design at a later date, but also at capture time for the designers? Or is rationale capture simply something that must be mandated as a form of compulsory documentation? We have investigated argumentation-based design rationale. Decisions in teams/organisations are invariably made through debate and discussion, but a lot of the effort and reasoning invested is often then lost, or locked in particular individuals' heads. In purely representational terms, by making the issues, alternatives and trade-offs in a discussion explicit, the context and rationale behind key decisions can be captured for future reference and re-use. To cut to the chase, we have been exploring how to negotiate the rationale capture cost-benefit tradeoff by providing tools for real time and asynchronous knowledge representation: combining hypermedia (for flexible linking), modelling (for explicit conceptualisation of problems) and meeting facilitation skills. This combination turns out to be a powerful approach to a particular flavour of 'knowledge management', with wider applicability than just software design. We call this overall approach Compendium.Contact: Simon Buckingham-Shum
sdr in dataset crc