Sharing and Exploiting Requirement Decisions

Continuous software engineering is an agile development process that puts particular emphasis on the incremental implementation of requirements and their rapid validation through user feedback. This involves frequent and incremental decision making, which needs to be shared within the team. Requirements engineers and developers have to share their decision knowledge since the decisions made are particularly important for future requirements. It has been a vision for long that important decision knowledge gets documented and shared [1]. However, several reasons hinder requirements engineers and developers from doing this, for example, the intrusiveness and overhead of the documentation [2]. Current software development tools provide opportunities to minimize the overhead. Issue tracking and version control systems offer lightweight documentation locations, such as issue comments, commit messages, and code comments. With ConDec, we develop tool support for the continuous management of decision knowledge that uses techniques for natural language processing and integrates into tools that developers often use1, for example, into the issue tracking system Jira2. In this work, we focus on how ConDec enables requirements engineers and developers to share and exploit decision knowledge regarding requirements.