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For a number of years, members of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Design community have studied Design Rationale (DR), the reasons behind decisions made while designing. DR is invaluable as an aid for revising, maintaining, documenting, evaluating, and learning the design.

The presence of DR would be especially valuable for software maintenance. The rationale would provide insight into why the system is the way it is by giving the reasons behind the design decisions, could help to indicate where changes might be needed during maintenance if design goals change, and help the maintainer avoid repeating earlier mistakes by explicitly documenting alternatives that were tried earlier that did not work.