Framework for documenting design decisions in product families development

The lack of documentation of the decisions taken during the development is common to many software systems. This makes it difficult to use the experience in future developments. This picture is worse when dealing with a family of products. The lack of documentation on the design decisions may preclude coherent evolution and development of products. This paper presents a framework for representing and supporting design decisions in the development of product families. The information is structured as a DDT (Design Decision Tree), where nodes represent design decisions and branches relate nodes to each other. The access to this information is based on HTML and WWW navigators. A simple case study is presented in order to illustrate the approach and to show its feasibility.