Agent-Based Support for Communication Between Developers and Users in Software Design

Research in knowledge-based software engineering has led to advances in the ability to specify and automatically generate software. Advances in the support of upstream activities have focussed on assisting software developers. We examine the possibility of extending computer-based support in the software development process to allow end users to participate, providing feedback directly to developers. The approach uses the notion of " agents " developed in artificial intelligence research and concepts of participatory design. Namely, agents monitor end users working with prototype systems and report mismatches between developers' expectations and a system's actual usage. At the same time, the agents provide end users with an opportunity to communicate with developers, either synchronously or asynchronously. The use of agents is based on actual software development experiences. Research in knowledge-based software engineering has led to advances in the ability to specify and automatically generate software. This research has, in recent years, led to advances in supporting upstream software processes, including requirements analysis [18]. However, the tools that exist are intended to assist software developers only; end users are one-step removed from the systems being developed for them. We examine the possibility of extending computer-based support in the software development process to allow end users to participate, providing feedback directly to developers. Our research effort shares many goals with research in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), but it also extends it by integrating it with concepts of participatory design [4][7]. Namely, end users are also " stakeholders " in a software product and need to be brought into the development process. We build on an evolutionary model of software development with the goal of improving the expected usability of a system by active, computer-based support for feedback from users of prototype systems. Representative users would interact with prototype systems while software agents monitor their interactions and, under certain conditions, enable synchronous and asyn-chronous communication with the system developers or other stakeholders. This agent-based interaction complements traditional participatory design in which users are tightly integrated into the development process with face-to-face meetings. The agent-based approach enables the usability of a prototype to be observed unobtrusively while users perform their normal tasks. It also reduces the travel requirements between users' and developers' sites in companies that are geographically distributed. Furthermore , agents can monitor a greater number of users as a prototype becomes more robust or even after its distribution as a product. This approach is …