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Design rationales

Rationales

Failure to supply contemporaneous rationale for design decisions is a major defect in many software projects. Lack of accurate rationale causes issues to be revisited endlessly, causes maintenance bugs when a maintainer changes something without realizing it was done a certain way for some purpose, and shortens the useful lifetime of software.

Rationale is fairly easy to provide at the time decisions are made, but very hard to accurately recover even a short time later.