bCisive is an easier, faster way to capture the design rationale during a design process.
Whatever your design area – civil engineering, artificial intelligence, mechanical design, software engineering – it is important to record the decisions made during a design process, the reasons behind them, other alternatives considered, and arguments for and against. However, many formal methods of capturing this design rationale place a significant extra burden on designers, and are time-consuming and costly.
Based on design theorist Horst Rittel’s Issue-Based Information System (IBIS) grammar for argumentation, bCisive is a semi-formal system for recording easily and quickly the reasoning behind design decisions. By mapping the thinking and discussions about a design with bCisive, creating the design rationale becomes part of the design process.
A design rationale recorded as a bCisive map has uses including:
- Design justification – recording all information surrounding the design process, including alternatives rejected, helps designers justify the design decision made.
- Communication – gathering all design information clearly in one place improves shared understanding of the design problem and facilitates collaboration.
- Design reuse – building an archive of comprehensive design rationales improves corporate memory and allows existing designs to be modified easily for new requirements.
