THE PROBLEM
Software developers frequently encounter a recurring challenge: when asked "why a particular design choice was made?", the honest answer is often uncertainty — the original decision-maker must be consulted, if they remain accessible. In many cases, that individual has left the organization or no longer recalls the reasoning.
The rationale behind a significant decision including why a specific library was selected, why a particular validation check was introduced, or why a certain implementation shortcut was avoided — frequently exists solely in an individual's memory, or is embedded deep within an archived GitHub issue conversation thread causing loss off technical knowledge often known as "Tacit Knowledge".
Loss of design decision knowledge may lead to unconscious damage to the system's architecture eventually making your software system less maintainable over time until it becomes too expensive to maintain.
SOLUTION
Synolytic is a software system that automatically identifies important design decisions made during software development and helps engineering teams preserve them as searchable, documented knowledge. It analyzes the GitHub issues and conversation threads to identify meaningful design decisions that may not have been formally recorded. Synolytic then compares those decisions with existing project documentation. When a decision appears to be missing or inadequately documented, it flags it as a documentation gap, allowing developers to review the original conversation and decide whether the documentation should be created or updated. This way, Synolytic helps continuously recover valuable design knowledge from development history and connect it to official technical documentations allowing developers maintain a healthy evolution of the software system.