title: Comprehensive and Targeted Access to and Visualization of Decision Knowledge
creator: Anders, Michael
subject: ddc-000
subject: 000 Generalities, Science
subject: ddc-004
subject: 004 Data processing Computer science
description: [Context & Motivation] Developers need to document decisions and related decision knowledge during the software development process. This ensures that future decisions  can be assessed in the right context and past decisions can be retraced and understood. The documentation of decision knowledge encompasses all aspects that comprise a decision,  including the problem, alternatives, arguments for and against these alternatives, and the selected solution. Since the value of the documentation is not immediately apparent, it is important to provide tools that allow easy documentation and coherent visualization of the documented knowledge. It also demands maintenance of the documentation  to ensure consistency and completeness.  [Contributions] This thesis provides a problem investigation, a treatment design, and an evaluation concerning the management and visualization of documented decision knowledge. The problem investigation was done in the form of a literature review on current approaches towards the grouping of decision knowledge. The results of the review show that decision grouping is often merely a small part of larger frameworks. These frameworks either use predefined labels for their groups or allow the users to  freely select group names. The practical contributions in this thesis are the extension of the Jira ConDec plug-in, which provides features for the documentation and visualization of decision knowledge within Jira. In particular, a grouping possibility for decisions  as well as respective views and filters were added to this plug-in. To keep the necessary time spent on the documentation process as low as possible, it was decided to use a mix of fixed groups, in the form of different decision levels and custom groups, which the user is free to assign. New views were implemented which allow users to see relationships between source code and Jira issues and a dashboard is built, which can be used to assess the completeness of decision knowledge within a Jira project. The implementation was preceded by a specification of requirements and a design phase. Extensive testing, including system and component tests, were part of the quality assurance phase. Lastly, an evaluation was done by creating and analysing a gold standard of decision  knowledge documentation and a survey with developers who provided feedback on the plug-in extension.  [Conclusions] The main focus of the thesis was to improve the visualization of relationships between knowledge elements. The evaluation showed that especially those views,  creating connections between Jira elements and code classes were highly anticipated by ConDec users, as support for this form of visualization did not exist. The newly  implemented features were almost uniformly evaluated positively. Some concerns were expressed about a need for even more information to be displayed within the views.  This was a result of the compromise between a wealth of information and a possible overload in individual views. Evaluation of the responsiveness and time behaviour of the  newly implemented features also showed that loading times were passable but require more focus in future works to improve the user experience thoroughly.
date: 2020
type: Master's thesis
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29025/1/Masterarbeit_Michael_Anders.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00029025
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-290255
identifier:   Anders, Michael  (2020) Comprehensive and Targeted Access to and Visualization of Decision Knowledge.  [Master's thesis]     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29025/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng