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A design can be documented in many different ways. Design documentation ranges from formal design specifications, often following a rigorous standard imposed by an outside agency, to informal notes contained in the notebooks of the individual designers. One type of documentation that is often only recorded informally, if recorded at all, is design rationale (DR)-the reasons behind the design decisions and, in some cases, a record of what decisions were not made and why.

This information could be valuable for many reasons, both during the design process, and later when the designed artifact requires modification. There have been many systems developed to capture and use rationale and several survey papers comparing them. The surveys resulted in several ways to classify design rationale tools. This paper combines these classifications and describes how they apply to a selection of DR tools. It also …