@article {Simula.approve.88,
	title = {The Value of Design Rationale Information},
	journal = {ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology},
	volume = {22},
	year = {2013},
	publisher = {ACM},
	abstract = {A complete and detailed Design Rationale Documentation (DRD) could support many software development activities, such as an impact analysis or a major redesign. However, a full DRD is too onerous for systematic industrial use as it is not cost-effective to write, maintain, or read. The key idea investigated in this paper is that DRD should be adopted only to the extent required to support activities particularly difficult to enact or in need of significant improvement in a particular context. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the possibility to customize the DRD by documenting only the information that will probably be required for executing an activity. This customization strategy relies on the hypothesis that the value of a DRD information item depends on its category (e.g. Assumptions, Related requirements, etc.) and on the activity it is meant to support. This hypothesis is investigated through two controlled experiments involving a total of seventy-five post-graduate master students as experimental subjects. The value of DRD information was shown to significantly depend on its category and, within the same category, on the activity it supports. Furthermore, our results show that, on average among activities, documenting only the information that has been required at least half of the time (i.e., the information that will probably be required in the future) generates a customized DRD containing about half the information of a full documentation. Such a significant reduction of information to document is expected to mitigate the effects of inhibitors that are currently preventing practitioners from documenting the rationale of their design decisions.},
	author = {Falessi, Davide and Briand, Lionel Claude and Cantone, Giovanni and Capilla, Rafael and Kruchten, Philippe}
}
@techreport {Simula.simula.277,
	title = {The Value of Design Rationale Information},
	number = {2010-13},
	year = {2010},
	publisher = {Simula Research Laboratory},
	abstract = {A complete and detailed Design Rationale Documentation (DRD) could support many software development activities, such as an impact analysis or a major redesign. However, a full DRD is too onerous for systematic industrial use as it is not cost-effective to write, maintain, or read. The key idea investigated in this paper is that DRD should be adopted only to the extent required to support activities particularly difficult to enact or in need of significant improvement in a particular context. The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the possibility to customize the DRD by documenting only the information that will probably be required for executing an activity. This customization strategy relies on the hypothesis that the value of a DRD information item depends on its category (e.g. Assumptions, Related requirements, etc.) and on the activity it is meant to support. This hypothesis is investigated through two controlled experiments involving a total of seventy-five post-graduate master students as experimental subjects. The value of DRD information was shown to significantly depend on its category and, within the same category, on the activity it supports. Furthermore, our results show that, on average among activities, documenting only the information that has been required at least half of the time (i.e., the information that will probably be required in the future) generates a customized DRD containing about half the information of a full documentation. Such a significant reduction of information to document is expected to mitigate the effects of inhibitors that are currently preventing practitioners from documenting the rationale of their design decisions.},
	author = {Falessi, Davide and Briand, Lionel and Cantone, Giovanni and Capilla, Rafael and Kruchten, Philippe}
}
@inproceedings {Simula.simula.478,
	title = {Value-Based Design Decision Rationale Documentation: a Replicated Experiment},
	journal = {Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Sharing and reusing architectural knowledge},
	year = {2008},
	publisher = {ACM},
	type = {Conference},
	abstract = {ABSTRACT The explicit documentation of the rationale of design decisions is a practice generally encouraged but rarely implemented in industry because of a variety of inhibitors. Known methods for Design Decisions Rationale Documentation (DDRD) are aimed to maximize the benefits for practitioners who should utilize the DDRD by imposing the burden on the developers of documenting all the potentially useful information. In our view, the adoption of a tailored DDRD, consisting only of the required set of information, would mitigate the effects of DDRD inhibitors. This paper focuses on confirming empirically the feasibility of a valuebased approach for documenting the rationale behind design decisions, and the importance of different DDRD information categories. In this context, this work describes a replicated experiment carried out at the University Rey Juan Carlos of Madrid (Spain) aimed to validate previous results from an analogous study conducted at the University of Roma Tor Vergata (Italy). Results confirm that the level of utility related to the same category of DDRD information significantly changes depending on its purpose.},
	isbn = {978-1-60558-038-8},
	author = {Falessi, Davide and Capilla, Rafael and Cantone, Giovanni},
	editor = {Avgeriou, Paris and Lago, Patricia and Kruchten, Philippe}
}
