Experiences with planning techniques for assisting software design activities

Abstract Any software design process can be seen as a workflow of design tasks, in which the developer makes different decisions regarding both functionality and quality-attribute properties of the intended system. However, ensuring the right compromises among design solutions is always a problematic and error-prone activity for the developer. Furthermore, he/she may get overwhelmed by the diversity of design techniques and technologies nowadays available. Along this line, we believe that it is possible to provide a declarative representation of this knowledge, so as to apply AI techniques when searching for solutions in the design space. Specifically, mixed-initiative planning algorithms are an interesting approach to automate some aspects of that search. In this paper, we report on three successful experiences with planning to assist the developer in decision-making for architectural and object-oriented design contexts. We also analyze the perspectives of a planning-based approach in the development of software design tools.

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