Continuous Rationale Visualization
Anja Kleebaum, Barbara Paech, Jan Ole Johanßen, Bernd Bruegge · 2021
Continuous software engineering (CSE) is characterized by frequent changes. It is challenging for developers to change software while sustaining its high quality so that the software is always deployable to the users. Rationale management provides an opportunity to support the change process during CSE. However, rationale management is not well integrated into CSE. Even if the rationale is captured, e. g. in the issue tracking system, it is difficult to access in the context of requirements, code, and other software artifacts. In this paper, we present tool support called ConDec to make rationale explicit during CSE and to integrate rationale into a knowledge graph data structure consisting of requirements, code, and other software artifacts. The knowledge graph is visualized in various ways and the developers can access the knowledge views from software artifacts such as requirements and code. They can interact with and filter the knowledge views. In particular, they can use transitive links, for example, to access all the decisions made in the context of a particular requirement or code file. We demonstrate the usefulness of the knowledge views using a case study project.