Generating design knowledge though data mining

Designing software is an expensive process. Our claim is that designing software can become more efficient if designers have knowledge about their design processes. One avenue of capturing the design process is through documentation. People have not focused on documentation for the purpose of generating design knowledge. A design platform called Lifecycle Manager (LCM) allows designers to document all steps of their design process. However, LCM does not have the means for interpreting the documentation that it collects. Our goal is to add that capability by studying how data mining can be applied to generate design knowledge. We developed a data mining tool and implemented four data mining algorithms on data captured by LCM, to learn that design knowledge cannot be gained from only one pattern. We learned about the evolution of LCM design by analyzing the data mining results. We plan to incorporate our tool into LCM.