Continuous Design Decision Support

Abstract

In this chapter, we elaborate on how design decisions are made, documented, and exploited during software evolution. We emphasise the importance of design decisions, in particular in the context of continuous software engineering.We detail the challenge of the intrusiveness of rational decision-making, documentation, and exploitation of design decisions and the challenge of ensuring consistency between design decisions and software artefacts. The main contributions of this chapter are three approaches to a continuous design decision support: First, we present an approach that supports developers in design decision-making using a catalogue of design patterns. Second, we present an approach to support the awareness for documented design decisions by integrating the decision documentation with the underlying source code. Third, we present how short-cycled practices in continuous software engineering can be used to support the documentation and exploitation of design decisions.