A new approach to effective use of design rationale in practice

Documentation of design rationale (DR) has great potential for improving the quality of design and construction. Yet 30 years of research has failed to make use of DR practical in real-world projects. This failure is above all due to the costs and disruption associated with capturing and structuring of the DR. We propose here a new approach to avoid the necessity for a separate capture-and-structuring phase. Instead, our approach takes advantage of three crucial features of the documents used in everyday practice. First, these documents contain large amounts of useful rationale. Second, these documents are prepared and often received in machine-readable form - or can easily be converted to such a form. The third feature - and the central subject of this paper - is that the terminology used in these documents provides a surprisingly reliable basis for retrieval of rationale from them. Together these three features imply that simple methods of free-text search could be used in conjunction with modern networked computing to retrieve relevant rationale from documents located anywhere within an organization.