SoftCord: an intelligent agent for coordination in software development projects

Over the years, software development has become more complex. and the problems of unreliability, high maintenance costs, and time overruns have greatly increased. A major contributor to this state of crisis in software development is the problem of coordinating activities. Based on a case study of a large software development project, we develop SoftCord, an intelligent agent that helps improve coordination in these projects. SoftCord is an autonomous program that incrementally records problem solving knowledge in a knowledge base (the MS-ATMS), and informs designers of inter-task conficts when these are detected. Other features of SoftCord include the ability to respond to queries from individual designers, and the abtlity to set up and support negotiation sessions between designers when conflict resolution is necessary. 0 I997 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.