A Quality Assistant for Object-Oriented Software Design Processes

In Object-Oriented system development, a class deenition is the end product of a design process. The class does not normally hold information regarding its design history. Merging documentation and software into a single entity is regarded as important in O-O languages such as Eiiel and it is possible to include the documentation using the assertion mechanisms and comment statements. But Eiiel does not provide explicit support to capture the rationale behind the design of classes as part of the software design process. This paper discusses the notion and implementation of an intelligent link between documentation and software system to track design rationales for Eiiel classes.