Rationale Management Challenges in Requirements Engineering

Abstract—Rationale and rationale management have been play-ing an increasingly prominent role in software system devel-opment mainly due to the knowledge demand during system evaluation, maintenance, and evolution, especially for large and complex systems. The rationale management for requirements engineering, as a commencing and critical phase in software development life cycle, is still under-exploited. In this paper, we first survey briefly the state-of-the-art on rationale employment and applications in requirements engineering. Secondly, we identify the challenges in integrating rationale management in requirements engineering activities in order to promote further investigations and define a research agenda on rationale management in requirements engineering. Keywords-rationale management; requirements rationale knowledge; requirements engineering; knowledge management I