We summarize the paper Continuous Management of Requirement Decisions Using the ConDec Tools, which we presented at the 26th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering (REFSQ2020). We summarize ConDec’s features and a usage scenario. In addition, the REFSQ paper provides an overview of the views, the architecture, and it sketches evaluation efforts

Bruegge, Bernd

Johanssen, Jan Ole

Kleebaum, Anja

Paech, Barbara

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cbS. Götz, L. Linsbauer, I. Schaefer, A. Wortmann (Hrsg.): Software Engineering 2021 Satellite Events,Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI), Gesellschaft für Informatik, Bonn 2021 1Continuous Rationale Management Using the ConDec ToolsAnja Kleebaum1, Jan Ole Johanssen2, Barbara Paech3, Bernd Bruegge4Abstract: We summarize the paper Continuous Management of Requirement Decisions Using theConDec Tools, which we presented at the 26𝑡ℎ International Working Conference on RequirementsEngineering (REFSQ2020). We summarize ConDec’s features and a usage scenario. In addition, theREFSQ paper provides an overview of the views, the architecture, and it sketches evaluation efforts.Keywords: Rationale Management; Decision Knowledge; Knowledge Graph; Requirements; Code;Design Decisions; Change Impact Analysis; Agile Software Development; ConDecSummaryWhile developing a software system, developers – as well as stakeholders of other roles, suchas requirements engineers, architects, or testers – continuously make decisions and have toreflect on previous decisions. For example, they decide on how to implement functionalrequirements, how to fulfill quality requirements, and how to solve trade-offs betweenthem. They build up important decision knowledge, which is also referred to as rationale.It is important to manage and share decision knowledge in the context of requirementsand code for the success of a software development project. However, decision knowledgemanagement is challenging: 1) The documentation of decision knowledge is an additionaleffort, i.e., it is intrusive in the development process. 2) The documented knowledge can beof low quality in terms of completeness and consistency. 3) It might be distributed acrossmany documentation locations, such as issue comments and commit messages, and thusdifficult to access, share, and use. 4) The documented knowledge can become very largewith a lot of knowledge elements and links in between them.The ConDec tools for the continuous management of decision knowledge aim to overcomethese challenges. ConDec provides features and views for documenting and exploitingdecision knowledge in the context of software artifacts, in particular requirements andcode. ConDec integrates into the workflows of agile software development. The developersdocument decision knowledge, e.g., decision problems, solution options, and arguments,within the issue tracking system, commit messages, and code comments. ConDec builds upa knowledge graph of requirements, decision knowledge, code, and other artifacts (Figure 1).1 Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany, kleebaum@informatik.uni-heidelberg.de2 Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany, jan.johanssen@tum.de3 Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany, paech@informatik.uni-heidelberg.de4 Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany, bruegge@in.tum.deCopyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors.Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).2 Anja Kleebaum, Jan Ole Johanssen, Barbara Paech, Bernd BrueggeRequirementDevelopment taskDecision problemCode classDecision captured in thecommit messageCon-argument against the alternativeof another decision problemFig. 1: View on the knowledge subgraph starting from a requirement.Imagine the following scenario about the development of a user log-in system: An importantdecision problem is to select an algorithm to encrypt passwords to ensure their confidentiality.Imagine that a developer captures the question How to encrypt the password? in thecomment of a Jira issue. The icon indicates that the developer uses a markup language-likesyntax to highlight the question as a decision problem. Subsequently, the developer capturesthe solution for the decision problem together with a Jira issue identifier (key) in a commitmessage. Now, ConDec performs three actions automatically: 1) It transcribes the commitmessage into a new comment of this Jira issue. 2) It highlights the solution decision using asupervised text classifier, which can be trained and evaluated on the underlying softwaredevelopment project. 3) It automatically links the solution decision to the respective decisionproblem within the knowledge graph. In addition to the automatic linking, developers canmanually create and maintain links between knowledge elements in the knowledge graph.ConDec supports decision knowledge sharing and collaborative decision making usinga rationale backlog and in meeting agendas. ConDec introduces a definition of done forhigh-quality rationale documentation. It supports the fulfillment of the definition of donewith the help of dashboards and automated quality checks integrated into the developmentworkflow, e.g., when finishing a requirement. For example, the developer can only finishthe log-in requirement if all the decision problems that are documented in a certain linkdistance in the knowledge graph are solved. The dashboard shows metrics regarding the intra-rationale completeness (e.g., are there arguments for the decisions?), the rationale coverageof requirements and code (e.g., how many decisions are documented for a requirement?), therationale-to-artifact traceability (e.g., is it possible to navigate to the requirements affectedby a decision?), and the feature branch quality regarding the rationale documentation.References[Kl20] Kleebaum,A.; Johanssen, J. O.; Paech, B.; Bruegge, B.: ContinuousManagement ofRequirement Decisions Using the ConDec Tools. In: 26th International Conferenceon Requirements Engineering Workshops, Doctoral Symposium, Live StudiesTrack, and Poster Track (REFSQ20). CEUR-WS.org, Pisa, Italy, 2020.

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