Thirty years ago, I first entered the dark realm of software engineering, through a prior interest in documentation. In those days, documentation pretty much meant functional specifications. The idea that stakeholders in a system (its implementers, its end-users, its maintainers, and so forth) might want something other than an alphabetic list of function definitions was just taking hold. There was an exciting (to me) vision of stakeholders accessing and contributing to explanations of how and why aspects of a system work as they do, tradeoff analysis of concomitant downsides, and perhaps even accounts of why other possible approaches were not followed. There were many challenges to overcome in achieving this vision. The most formidable is the belief that people do not like to create or use do- mentation. This negative image of documentation is (unfortunately) more than just the bias of a few incorrigible system developers. It is more like a deep truth about human information behavior, about how human beings construe and act towards information. Humans are, by default, active users of information; they want to try things out, and get things done. When documentation is interposed as a prerequisite between people and a desired activity, they try to skip through it, circumvent it, or undermine it. Desi- ing information to suit the needs and interests of its users is an abiding challenge, but we have come a long way from functional specifications as the only answer.
Reviews
Ten years ago, with Tom Moran, I edited a book entitled "Design Rationale." I think that book has held up quite well, though a decade onward it does seem a bit prefatory. It is past time for another detailed summary of research on design rationale. Allen Dutoit, Ray McCall, Ivan Mistrik and Barbara Paech have done an excellent job of this in "Rationale management in software engineering." The chapters in this volume show how design rationale can be incorporated into the heart of the software development process - into requirements engineering, software architecture, and code design. (John Carroll, School of Information Sciences and Technology, Penn State University, USA)
Editors and Affiliations
Institut für Informatik, Technische Universität München, Garching bei München, Germany
Allen H. Dutoit
College of Architecture & Planning, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
Raymond McCall
Publication and Information Systems, Fraunhofer Institute für Integrated, Darmstadt, Germany
Ivan Mistrík
Institut für Informatik, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
Barbara Paech
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Rationale Management in Software Engineering
Editors: Allen H. Dutoit, Raymond McCall, Ivan Mistrík, Barbara Paech
