SOFTWARE LIFE-CYCLE SUPPORT - DECISION BASED SOFTWARE-DEVELOPMENT

The software engineering life cycle encompasses a broad range of activities from the initial elicitation of the system requirements to the continuing evolution of the operational system. These activities can be best supported if there is a unifying paradigm which can integrate functional and non-functional problem-solving, process management, and knowledge acquisition and reuse. The Decision Based Software Development (DBSD) paradigm structures the software development and evolution process as a continuous problem-solving and decision making activity. In the DBSD paradigm, the software engineering team identifies and articulates software development problems, proposes alternative solutions, develops supporting justifications from which a decision is made. By making the problem solving process visible, DBSD allows management to control the creative, and sometimes chaotic, set of activities comprising software development. By recording the decisions, decision making rationale and the relationships among decisions and between decisions and the products of software development, the source code and related documents are structured significantly different from traditional structures such as the modular or data flow view. This structure associates a decision with only those parts of the documents affected by that decision. These decision views support continued evolution of the software system because both the rationale for individual decisions are recorded as well as the interrelationships among decisions. Documenting these interrelationships helps the software engineer assess the impact of changing a decision and to understand the consistency requirements among a set of decisions.