Continuous software engineering (CSE) is characterized by frequent changes. It is challenging for developers to change software while sustaining its high quality so that the software is always deployable to the users. Rationale management provides an opportunity to support the change process during CSE. However, rationale management is not well integrated into CSE. Even if the rationale is captured, e. g. in the issue tracking system, it is difficult to access in the context of requirements, code, and other software artifacts. In this paper, we present tool support called ConDec to make rationale explicit during CSE and to integrate rationale into a knowledge graph data structure consisting of requirements, code, and other software artifacts. The knowledge graph is visualized in various ways and the developers can access the knowledge views from software artifacts such as requirements and code. They can interact with and filter the knowledge views. In particular, they can use transitive links, for example, to access all the decisions made in the context of a particular requirement or code file. We demonstrate the usefulness of the knowledge views using a case study project.

Continuous Rationale Visualization

The ninth IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2021) builds upon the success of the previous eight editions of VISSOFT, which in turn followed after six editions of the IEEE International Workshop on Visualizing Software for Understanding and Analysis (VISSOFT) and five editions of the ACM Sympo0sium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS). In 2021, VISSOFT will take place and be co-located with ICSME.