Familiar - A System For Capturing And Reusing Design Rationale

Friday, October 9, 1998
11 a.m.
Fuller Labs 311

"Design Rationale" refers to information about why a system was designed the way it was. Capture of design rationale is essential for the adaptability and evolvability. Unfortunately, design rationale is normally captured using a baroque set of ad hoc methods, including comments in code, post-hoc documentation, variable naming conventions, and so forth.

In this talk, I present FAMILIAR, an ongoing project aimed at supporting a more systematic way of capturing and consulting design rationale. FAMILIAR combines techniques for alternatives management with an approach to system modeling called Functional Representation. Alternatives management allows a designer to express design rationale in terms of comparisons of a design with other paths that were considered but not taken. The Functional Representation provides a means to express the similarity of various alternatives at different levels of abstractions. Together they provide a powerful and flexible way to express design rationale.

Host

David Brown

Colloquium Coordinator

Carolina Ruiz

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Last modified: Sep 27, 2006, 16:05 EDT