Representation And Maintenance of process knowledge for large Scale Systems development

Large systems maintenance efforts are often hindered because much of the richness of the design process, namely the process knowledge, involving the deliberation on alternative design decisions, is lost in the course of designing and changing such systems. In this research, we present a formalism called REMAP (REpresentation and MAintenance of Process knowledge) that is geared towards capturing the rationales for design decisions and using this along with application domain specific knowledge to reason about changes in design decisions. We significantly extend the Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS), a method for recording the argumentation related to deliberations. Our model relates process knowledge to the objects that are created during the design process. This model is validated using a study of the problem solving behavior of systems analysts engaged in developing functional specifications. We have implemented a prototype of an environment to support the process of design and maintenance based on our model. The environment facilitates acquiring, maintaining and reasoning with various knowledge components that are used in design and maintenance tasks.