Towards a Generic Method for Articulating Design Uncertainty

Modelers encounter different kinds of uncertainty in their designs and models of software systems. One such type concerns uncertainty about how to build a model. This is called design-time uncertainty, and existing research has studied how modelers can work in its presence. However, the process by which they come to elicit and express their uncertainties remains unclear. In this paper, we take steps towards addressing this gap by introducing DRUIDE (Design and Requirements Uncertainty Integrated Development Environment), a language and workflow for articulating design time uncertainty. We present and illustrate our proposal on a software design example. Additionally, we conduct a real life case study of domain analysis related to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and evaluate DRUIDE with it. Our evaluation shows that DRUIDE is sufficiently expressive to articulate design time uncertainty