Supporting Evolution: Using Rationale in Use Case Driven Software Development

The requirements specification–as outcome of the requirements engineering process–falls short of capturing other useful information generated during this process, such as the justification for selected requirements, trade-offs made by stakeholders, and alternative requirements that were discarded. In the context of evolving systems and distributed development, this information is essential. Rationale methods focus on capturing and structuring this missing information. In this paper, we propose an integrated process for capturing requirements and their rationale, discuss its tool support, and describe planned experiments to evaluate this process. Although the idea of integrating rationale methods with requirements engineering is not new, few research projects have focused on the use of rationale during later phases to support the evolution of the system under development.