Design Reasoning Improves Software Design Quality

Making justifiable decisions is a critical aspect of software architec-ture design. However, there has been limited empirical research on the effects of design reasoning on the quality of software design. The goal of this work is to investigate if there is any quality improvement to software design when design reasoning is applied. We conducted an empirical study involving twenty designers, the designers were asked to design a user interface and their designs were scored and compared. The results showed that the test group that was equipped with design reasoning produced a higher quality design than the control group, especially for inexperienced designers.