ConDec: Continuous Management of Decision Knowledge
While developing a software system, developers – as well as stakeholders of other roles, such as requirements engineers, architects, or testers – continuously make decisions and have to reflect on previous decisions. For example, they decide on how to implement functional requirements, how to fulfill quality requirements, and how to solve trade-offs between them. They build up important decision knowledge, which is also referred to as rationale. It is important to manage and share decision knowledge in the context of requirements and code for the success of a software development project. However, decision knowledge management is challenging.
The ConDec tools for the continuous management of decision knowledge aim to overcome these challenges. ConDec provides features and views for documenting and exploiting decision knowledge in the context of software artifacts, in particular requirements and code. ConDec integrates into the workflows of agile software development. The developers document decision knowledge, e.g., decision problems, solution options, and arguments, within the issue tracking system, commit messages, and code comments. ConDec builds up a knowledge graph of requirements, decision knowledge, code, and other artifacts.
The ConDec tools directly integrate into the development tools that requirements engineers and developers often use, for example, into the issue tracking system, version control system, wiki system, chat system, and the integrated development environment. Currently, the ConDec tools consist of a Jira, an Eclipse, a Visual Studio Code, a Confluence, a Slack, and a Bitbucket plugin.
Watch the ConDec tool demo to get a first impression.
The ConDec tools are open source: github.com/cures-hub
The ConDec Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket plugins are available via the Atlassian Marketplace.
Persons
We thank the students who contributed to the ConDec tools. You find the involved students in the archive of practical work.
Publications
2023
Kleebaum A Continuous Rationale Management Dissertation, Heidelberg University, Germany, 2023, DOI, digital appendix
2021
Kleebaum A, Paech B, Johanssen J O, Bruegge B Continuous Rationale Visualization 9th Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021), Luxembourg/Virtual, September 27-29, 2021, presentation is available at Morressier, original version is available at ieeexplore.ieee.org, authors' version PDF Download
Kleebaum A, Paech B, Johanssen J O, Bruegge B Continuous Rationale Identification in Issue Tracking and Version Control Systems Joint Proceedings of REFSQ-2021 Workshops, OpenRE, Posters and Tools Track, and Doctoral Symposium, Essen (Germany)/Virtual, April 12, 2021, PDF Download
Kleebaum A, Johanssen J O, Paech B, Bruegge B Continuous Rationale Management Using the ConDec Tools Software Engineering Satellite Events (SE 2021), Braunschweig (Germany)/Virtual, February 22-26, 2021, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V., PDF Download
2020
Kleebaum A, Johanssen J O, Paech B, Bruegge B Continuous Management of Requirement Decisions Using the ConDec Tools Co-Located Events of the 26th International Conference on Requirements Engineering (REFSQ-JP'20), Pisa (Italy)/Virtual, March, 2020, CEUR-WS.org, PDF Download, Best Paper Award
2019
Kleebaum A, Johanssen J O, Paech B, Bruegge B Sharing and Exploiting Requirement Decisions Fachgruppentreffen Requirements Engineering (FGRE'19), Heidelberg (Germany), November 28-29, 2019, Gesellschaft für Informatik, PDF Download
Kleebaum A, Konersmann M, Langhammer M, Paech B, Goedicke M, Reussner R Continuous Design Decision Support Managed Software Evolution, 2019, Springer, Cham, original version is available at link.springer.com, PDF Download
Kleebaum A, Johanssen J O, Paech B, Bruegge B How do Practitioners Manage Decision Knowledge during Continuous Software Engineering? 31st International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE'19), Lisbon (Portugal), July 10-12, 2019, KSI Research Inc., PDF Download
Kleebaum A, Johanssen J O, Paech B, Bruegge B Teaching Rationale Management in Agile Project Courses 16. Workshop Software Engineering im Unterricht der Hochschulen (SEUH), Bremerhaven (Germany), February 21-22, 2019, pp. 126-133, authors' version is available at heiDOK, PDF Download
2018
Kleebaum, A, Johanssen, J O, Paech, B, Alkadhi, R, Bruegge, B Decision Knowledge Triggers in Continuous Software Engineering 4th International Workshop on Rapid Continuous Software Engineering (RCoSE 2018), Gothenburg (Sweden), May 29, 2018, pp. 23-26, original version is available at dl.acm.org, authors' version PDF Download
Kleebaum, A, Johanssen, J O, Paech, B, Bruegge, B Tool Support for Decision and Usage Knowledge in Continuous Software Engineering 3rd Workshop on Continuous Software Engineering (CSE 2018), Ulm (Germany), March 6, 2018, pp. 74-77, CEUR-WS.org 2018, PDF Download
2017
Johanssen, J O, Kleebaum, A, Bruegge, B, Paech, B Towards the Visualization of Usage and Decision Knowledge in Continuous Software Engineering 5th Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017), NIER track, Shanghai (China), September 2017, pp. 104-108, IEEE 2017, original version is available at ieeexplore.ieee.org, authors' version PDF Download
Johanssen, J O, Kleebaum, A, Bruegge, B, Paech, B Towards a Systematic Approach to Integrate Usage and Decision Knowledge in Continuous Software Engineering 2nd Workshop on Continuous Software Engineering (CSE 2017), Hannover (Germany), February 20, 2017, pp. 7-11, CEUR-WS.org 2017, PDF Download
