Improving Software Design Reasoning: A Reminder Card Approach

Software designers have been known to think naturalistically. This means that there may be inadequate rational thinking during software design. In the past two decades, many research works suggested that designers need to produce design rationale. However, design rationale can be produced to retrofit naturalistic decisions, which means that design decisions may still not be well reasoned. Through a controlled experiment, we studied design reasoning and design rationale by asking participants to carry out a group design. As treatment, we provided 6 out of 12 student teams with a set of reasoning reminder cards to see how they compare with teams without the reminder cards. Additionally, we performed the same experiment with 2 teams of professionals who used the reminder cards, and compared the results with 3 teams of professionals. The experimental results show that both professionals and students who were equipped with the reasoning reminder cards reasoned more with their design. Second, the more a team discusses design reasoning, the more design rationale they find.