Diplomarbeit: Design and Implementation of a Rationale-Based Analysis Tool

Student: Timo Wolf
Supervisor: Allen Dutoit
Professor: Prof. Bernd Bruegge
Submission date: 15.11.2002

Milestones

Date	Description	Links
15.06.2002	Problem Statement	unavailable
15.11.2002	Submitted Thesis	pdf
17.12.2002	Final Presentation (with Marc Mährländer)	pdf, ppt

Abstract

The constant increasing technology inventions and the steadily increasing hardware capabilities leads to a constant demand for software development. The complexity of software increases, as more and more security critical problems are resolved by software solutions and the world becomes a computer connected environment. The demand for standalone applications decreases and the demand for connectivity and location independence increases in many software development domains. So, modern software development has to deal with an increasing complexity and is under high pressure for cheap solution, fast and in time development, and delivering fault tolerant and robust systems. The realization of complex software solutions can often only be resolved by many developers grouped in teams. Using software engineering techniques is the road to success in complex software development projects, containing many developers and different teams.

Software engineering is a modelling activity, in which the engineers deal with complexity through modelling. The software engineer separates the development process in different phases and focusing at any one time on only the relevant details. So many different models of the system and of the application domain are created during software engineering project.

Furthermore, the chair Applied Software Engineering [ASE] investigates techniques that are rationale-driven to detect, if they help address those problems. The rationale activities capture the context in which decisions about the system or the application domain were made and the rationale behind these decisions. The rationale information enables software engineers to understand the implication of changes by reviewing the decisions.

To accomplish a software engineering project, the engineers need software tools that supports the different software engineering phases. These tools should enable the engineer to build the requested models and capture the rationale information.

Work products

The RAT tool and related documents are checked in the sysiphus repository in CVS.

Related Topics

• Design and realization of a tool for linking source code and rationale knowledge (Marc Mährländer)