Decision Support for Software Process Management Teams: An Intelligent Software Agent Approach

This is a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL MONTEREY CA report procured by the Pentagon and made available for public release. It has been reproduced in the best form available to the Pentagon. It is not spiral-bound, but rather assembled with Velobinding in a soft, white linen cover. The Storming Media report number is A946773. The abstract provided by the Pentagon follows: Currently, SPAWAR Systems Center is lacking a unified software development environment that allows software developers to effectively manage software development projects across a diversified development environment. This unified environment is needed to provide up-to-date accurate information to the right people at the right time, increase the process knowledge-base, increase productivity, decrease time to market, eliminate redundancy, and ease job stress. This thesis proposes a conceptual model for software process management decision support in the form of an intelligent software agent network. The intelligent software agent network, called MENTOR, provides the knowledge-base that is crucial to the software development team, providing for a repeatable, defined, managed, and optimized development environment. This concept provides SSC software development mangers and team members with the ability to work in a unified and collaborative environment, regardless of organizational diversity or location. MENTOR will be utilized as an integral software development team member, providing tutorials and mentoring capabilities for management and process assistance, as well as providing process planning, risk analysis, and strategic planning recommendations for the successful completion of a software development effort, at all team levels. In addition, MENTOR will provide an effective communication environment that will enable the development team to minimize the time consuming workload involved in tracking individual tasking.