[dasil003]

Not sure about that. Writing software requires heavy rationalization just to get a minimally working system. This is one reason some people aren't cut out to be programmers—they just don't have to patience to deal with the pedantic requirements of implementing cold, hard, unambiguous system logic.

I think it's more about documentation of that rationalization, and I wouldn't want to raise the bar on this by requiring a review. The value of every engineer just braindumping the roughest cut of their thinking already provides a tremendous amount of value over the history of a long-lived code base. Personally I do this in commit messages even for solo projects, but for larger teams/code bases/SOAs a more formal document-based approach allowing for diagrams and additional metadata is highly valuable if done consistently.

[dllthomas]

Rationalization or reasoning? I'm not sure which you're talking about, and the meaning of your text winds up being pretty different in each case. I'm not sure I disagree with either.