Design Rationale - Applications

Applications

Design rationale has the potential to be used in many different ways. One set of uses, defined by Burge and Brown (1998), are:

• Design verification — The design rationale can be used to verify if the design decisions and the product itself are the reflection of what the designers and the users actually wanted.
• Design evaluation — The design rationale is used to evaluate the various design alternatives discussed during the design process.
• Design maintenance — The design rationale helps to determine the changes that are necessary to modify the design.
• Design reuse — The design rationale is used to determine how the existing design could be reused for a new requirement with or without any changes in it. If there is a need to modify the design, then the DR also suggests what needs to be modified in the design.
• Design teaching — The design rationale could be used as a resource to teach people who are unfamiliar with the design and the system.
• Design communication — The design rationale facilitates better communication among people who are involved in the design process and thus helps to come up with a better design.
• Design assistance — The design rationale could be used to verify the design decisions made during the design process.
• Design documentation — The design rationale is used to document the entire design process which involves the meeting room deliberations, alternatives discussed, reasons behind the design decisions and the product overview.

DR is used by research communities in software engineering, mechanical design, artificial intelligence, civil engineering, and human-computer interaction research. In software engineering, it could be used to support the designers ideas during requirement analysis, capturing and documenting design meetings and predicting possible issues due to new design approach. In civil engineering, it helps to coordinate the variety of work that the designers do at the same time in different areas of a construction project. It also help the designers to understand and respect each other’s ideas and resolve any possible issues.

The DR can also be used by the project managers to maintain their project plan and the project status up to date. Also, the project team members who missed a design meeting can refer back the DR to learn what was discussed on a particular topic. The unresolved issues captured in DR could be used to organize further meetings on those topics.

Design Rationale helps the designers to avoid the same mistakes made in the previous design. This can also be helpful to avoid duplication of work. In some cases DR could save time and money when a software system is upgraded from its previous versions.

There are several books and articles that provide excellent surveys of rationale approaches applied to HCI, Engineering Design and Software Engineering.