Beyond Information Silos - an Omnipresent Approach to Software Evolution

Nowadays, software development and maintenance are highly distributed processes that involve a multitude of supporting tools and resources. Knowledge relevant for a particular software maintenance task is typically dispersed over a wide range of artifacts in different representational formats and at different abstraction levels, resulting in isolated ‘information silos’. An increasing number of task-specific software tools aim to support developers, but this often results in additional challenges, as not every project member can be familiar with every tool and its applicability for a given problem. Furthermore, historical knowledge about successfully performed modifications is lost, since only the result is recorded in versioning systems, but not how a developer arrived at the solution. In this research, we introduce conceptual models for the software domain that go beyond existing program and tool models, by including maintenance processes and their constituents. The models are supported by a pro-active, ambient, knowledge-based environment that integrates user, tasks, tools, and resources, as well as processes and history-specific information. Given this ambient environment, we demonstrate how maintainers can be supported with contextual guidance during typical maintenance tasks through the use of ontology queries and reasoning services.