The development of an agent based critiquing system architecture for a project management tool: Prompter

摘要

Since the Software Crisis was first identified in 1969 there has been a frantic scramble among practitioners to define a software engineering discipline. This has led to development of established ‘best practices’ in areas of software design, metrics collection, cost estimation, risk analysis etc. To date, no tool has provided software managers with integrated project management support. This is the motivation behind the Prompter tool which seeks to provide assistance for project managers in the areas of decision support and planning throughout the lifecycle of a project.ududThe basis of this thesis is the design and development of a component of the Prompter tool known as the Daemon architecture. The Prompter tool, is an ESPRIT project developed by a consortium of companies including Dublin City University, Catalyst Software and Objectif Technologie. Its goal is to provide decision support to the user in the field of Software Project Management.ududThe Daemon Architecture for which I am responsible, provides the dynamic advice or criticism to the user using intelligent agents or mini experts. The architecture had to be as open as possible, distributed, domain independent, an easily expandable knowledge base, asynchronous from the rest of Prompter, have the ability to incorporate new Agent languages and finally, platform independence.ududThe first stage of this thesis involved the design of the architecture outlining some of its components. The second stage was the development of the architectural design into a functioning prototype operated within the Prompter tool. This is followed by a discussion of some of the more implementational issues that arose during this phase due to, design flaws, implementation languages chosen, networking problems etc.ududThe resulting architecture outlined in this thesis can thus be used to provide decision support in many domains and on many platforms and is easily maintainable.