Rationale and Requirements Engineering

Many of the decisions that have the greatest impact on the software development process are made during requirements analysis. Software Engineering Rationale(SER)can support this process by providing the ability to capture the decisions and the reasons behind them starting at these earliest phases. SER also supports requirements traceability throughout the process by directly mapping the development options chosen to the requirements that provide their rationale and by providing rationale for the requirements, thereby mapping requirements back to their source. In this chapter, we describe how rationale can support requirements engineering.