What Makes Software Different

Research on rationale in software engineering was originally inspired by research on rationale for the design of physical artifacts. While there is still much that software engineering can learn from the latter, it is important to recognize that the process of software development differs in crucial ways from the processes of developing physical artifacts. These differences have important consequences for the successful implementation of rationale management. One consequence is that software development has unique and urgent problems that rationale management can do much to solve. Another is that the ways in which software differs from a physical artifact provide unique advantages for implementing rationale management in software engineering.