System for Presenting and Investigating Design Alternatives and Rationales (SPIDAR)

The primary source of the time and labor cost in redesigning complex systems is the lack of comprehension of the overall system's limitations and what the motivation is for its current design. Designers can understand limited subsets of the system but have difficulties understanding the system in totality. The end result is an inability to understand the effects of design changes on various attributes of the system. The solution to the above problem is a system that provides detailed insight into software design for software designers and maintainers by presenting high-level attributes in a meaningful manner. Specifically, the solution must specify relevant system attributes and their associated features, integrate rationale histories for the design with the software artifacts, so arguments for/against various design alternatives can be captured, and present the attributes in a manner that allows rapid comprehension and comparison. Charles River Analytics Inc. is pleased to submit this proposal to design and develop a System for Presenting and Investigating Design Alternatives and Rationales (SPIDAR). SPIDAR combines attribute extraction and presentation backed by design rationale built into a plugin tool that can be inserted into a development environment