Design Rationale and Design Patterns in Reusable Software Design

This paper presents an in-progress development of a framework for using design rationale and design patterns for developing reusable software systems. The proposed framework will be used as an integrated design environment for reusable software design, to support collaborative development of software applications by a group of software specialists from a library of building block cases. These goals translate into the effort of exploring the use of Artificial Intelligence in better management of software development and maintenance process by providing faster, less costly, smarter and on-time decisions. The paper details the use of an explicit software development process to capture and disseminate specialized knowledge that augments the description of the cases in a library during the development of software applications by heterogeneous groups. This specialized knowledge constitutes an important part of a software organization’s memory, that is, the sharing of information and it’s common interpretations as a result of conceiving and implementing the combination of cases from a library when making software design decisions. The importance of preserving and using this specialized knowledge has become apparent with the recent trend of combining both the software development process and product. It has become essential to capture the design rationale to develop and design software systems efficiently and reliably.