Rationale describes the reasons behind decisions made while developing software (or any system). This includes the decisions, alternatives considered, and the arguments for and against each alternative. In the Software Engineering Using RATionale system, the arguments can map to functional requirements, non-functional requirements (which include the “ilities” such as scalability, reusability, affordability, security, performance, and subcategories of these attributes), assumptions made about the system (or its users or the environment it will run in), and any dependencies between alternatives. Users can also include questions in the rationale to indicate where more information is required before making a decision.

Current uses supported by SEURAT include syntactic checking on the rationale to ensure that each decision has a selected alternative, that selected alternatives have arguments in their favor, and that all questions have been answered. SEURAT also will calculate an evaluation score for each alternative and warn the user if the best rated alternative was not selected. This allows the user to use SEURAT to check the impact of disabling a requirement or assumption and allows the user to change the priority of a non-functional requirement and see how that affects the decisions made.  SEURAT provides traceability from functional and non-functional requirements to the alternatives selected and the software that implements those alternatives.

SEURAT is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in and supports the ability to associate alternatives directly with the code.

For more information on SEURAT and rationale, read the PDF presentation: Software Engineering Using Rationale (link will open in a new window). After reading the presentation, or if you feel the above information was sufficient, use the link below to take the survey.

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