Designing for Increased Software Maintainability

The recording and management of design rationales and design decisions are important issues in achieving better support for software maintenance. In the c ontext of existing work on design rationale models, this paper intr oduc es an appr oach to the integration of system design, design decisions and design rationales and the formalisation of design decisions in terms of software artifacts and their relationships. The relationships and prop ertieschar acterisingdesign decisions capture precisely the intent of these decisions, and can b e che cked and enfor cedto ensur ethat the decisions are followed and maintained in the actual development. We also show how the formalised design decisions can be use d in b etter supporting software comprehension and main-