Continuous Management of Requirement Decisions Using the ConDec Tools

[Context and motivation] While eliciting, prioritizing, and implementing requirements, requirements engineers and developers continuously make decisions. They establish important decision knowledge that needs to be documented and exploited, i. e., thoroughly managed, so that it contributes to the evolution and future changes of a software system. [Question/problem] The management of decision knowledge is difficult for various reasons: 1) The documentation process is an additional effort, i. e., it is intrusive in the development process. 2) The documented knowledge can be of low quality in terms of completeness and consistency. 3) It might be distributed across many documentation locations, such as issue comments and commit messages, and thus difficult to access and use. [Principal ideas/results] Continuous software engineering (CSE) emerged as a development process that involves frequent, incremental decision making, implementation, and validation of requirements. During CSE, requirements engineers and developers implicitly document decision knowledge during established practices, such as committing code, working with issues in an issue tracking system, or conducting meetings. That means that CSE offers opportunities for the non-intrusive capturing of decision knowledge in various documentation locations. [Contribution] We develop the ConDec tools (https://se.ifi.uni-heidelberg.de/condec.html) that support requirements engineers and developers in documenting and exploiting decision knowledge directly within the tools they use, such as issue tracking and wiki systems, related to various software artifacts, such as requirements and code, and during change impact analysis.