Checkable Representations of Design Decisions

设计是软件开发生命周期的一项重要活动，其输出是关于如何构建系统的一组决策，以及这些决策的基本原理。在实践中，构成设计的信息可能会因重复更改而逐渐丢失或失效，这些更改会在设计文档和代码之间引入逐渐不一致的情况。当设计信息丢失或变得无效时，未来对系统的更改将变得越来越费力且容易出错，这两个因素会导致软件质量较差。软件质量问题每周都会成为头条新闻，并可能严重影响加拿大和其他地方的公共安全和生活质量。*为了减轻软件系统中设计侵蚀的问题，我们建议研究发现、表示和交流低级别软件设计信息的新技术。这项研究的目的是阐述一种方法，支持在软件开发中有效地创建和使用可检查的设计决策表示。*拟议的研究将涉及三个互补的方面：设计决策恢复、设计决策表示和设计决策的有效沟通。对于设计恢复方面，我们将考虑一种基于知识的方法，该方法集成了来自静态分析和文本挖掘的特性。作为表示方面的一部分，我们将寻求开发一个充分平衡设计决策的表现性、可用性和可检查性的表示系统。沟通方面的目标将是有效地沟通现有决策和违反指定设计决策的问题。*以可检查的方式描述低级别设计决策的有效系统有可能对编程和其他软件开发实践产生积极影响，导致更高的软件质量，并提高软件开发效率。明确支持断言设计决策的编程系统也可能通过激励新手程序员在实现解决方案时有意识地考虑设计替代方案来影响计算教育。

Design is a significant activity of the software development life cycle whose output is a set of decisions on how to structure a system, along with rationale for these decisions. In practice, the information that constitutes a design can become progressively lost, or invalidated from repeated changes that introduce gradual inconsistencies between a design document and the code. When design information is lost or becomes invalid, future changes to a system become increasingly effort-intensive and error-prone, two factors that contribute to poor software quality. Software quality problems make headline news on a weekly basis and can severely impact public safety and quality of life in Canada and elsewhere.******To mitigate the problem of design erosion in software systems, we propose to investigate new techniques for discovering, representing, and communicating low-level software design information. The goal of the research is to elaborate an approach that supports the efficient creation and use of checkable representations of design decisions in software development.******The proposed research will involve three complementary facets: design decision recovery, design decision representation, and effective communication of design decisions. For the design recovery facet, we will consider a knowledge-based approach that integrates features derived from both static analysis and text mining. As part of the representation facet, we will seek to develop a representation system that adequately balances expressiveness, usability, and checkability for design decisions. The communication facet will target the problem of effectively communicating both existing decisions and violations of specified design decisions.******An effective system for describing low-level design decisions in a checkable way has the potential to positively impact programming and other software development practices, lead to higher software quality, and improve software development efficiency. A programming system that explicitly supports asserting design decisions may also impact computing education by stimulating novice programmers to consciously consider design alternatives when implementing solutions.