Communication and management support in system development environments

A System Development Support Environment that assists in communication and management tasks of software project members should aid the development of large, evolutionary computer systems. The environment proposed in this paper will include integrated capabilities for project management, system evaluation, documentation/help, and intelligent communication between designers/users, and either the system or other designers. The goal is to have the environment help collect, organize and disseminate information about a project, using a model of the underlying system. The work is based on the idea that people perform “Communication Acts” (ACTs) such as: questioning, griping, planning, requesting or informing, while interacting with a system, and that processing of these ACTs can be automated. A Taxonomy of “simple” ACTs has been created from initial, informal studies of system/user interaction. A knowledge-based synthesis approach is used to create an experimental environment to support a program synthesis (software) project [Phillips-81]. The environment design and framework, which is part of the author's Ph.D. thesis work in progress [Kedzierski-80], is discussed.