Diplomarbeit: Design and realization of a tool for linking source code and rationale knowledge

Student: Marc Mährländer
Supervisor: Allen Dutoit
Professor: Prof. Bernd Bruegge
Submission date: 15.11.2002

Milestones

Date	Description	Links
15.06.2002	Problem Statement	not available
15.11.2002	Thesis	not available
17.12.2002	Final Presentation (with Marc Mährländer)	pdf, ppt

Abstract/Problem Statement

In every software project today, many different issues are raised in all phases of the development process. The solutions for this issues are found during many discussions between the stakeholders of the project and -normally- only the selected solution becomes visible in the work products of the project, useful information generated during the discussion and development process such as the justification for selected solutions, trade-offs made by stakeholders, and alternative solutions that were discarded are not captured and thus lost.

Moreover, the discussion process is not integrated and ranges from face-to-face meetings over e-mail communication and messages posted on bboards. However, the discussion process is not structured nor integrated into today's development tools. And there is another natural problem: Especially for developers, designing and implementing is the interesting part, documentation is only a lot of work without a great personal benefit, because developers know their decisions. It is those who come after who get the benefit from the documentation task. So the task of document design rationale must be integrated in a way, that there is an direct profit for the developer. This can be done by integration of design rationale into the existing tools and at the same time creating an actual benefit for developers, because the discussion process is structured and integrated into their working tools.

Of course, there are tools available today to model such rationale information, but these tools are not integrated into the tools used by the developers during the different phases of the project, such as UML modelling tools, bboards or IDEs (Integrated Development Environments). We are sure, that it is unrealistic to believe, that under normal project conditions, usually time and financial pressure, there will be time for project members to model all there Issues and decisions into such an external tool. That is why an integration of the rationale and issue process into the existing development tools is necessary.

The goal of this project is to capture the rationale where it is created and make it available where it is needed, thus the rationale is integrated into the development tools used by the project participants, especially into an IDE.

Work products

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

Related Topics

• Rationale-Based Analysis Tool (Timo Wolf)