Intelligent Assistance without Artificial Intelligence

SMILE is a multi-user software engineering environment that behaves as an intelligent assistant. SMILE presents a ‘fileless environment’, derives and transforms data to shelter users from entering redundant information, automatically invokes programming tools, and actively participates in the software development and maintenance process. Unlike other intelligent assistants, SMILE is not a rule-based environment: its knowledge of software objects and the programming process is hardcoded into the environment. We describe SMILE’s functionality and explain how we achieved this functionality without reliance on artificial intelligence technology. The development and maintenance of SMILE is supported in part by the United States Army, Software Technology Development Division of CECOM COMM/ADP, Fort Monmouth, NJ and in part by ZTI-SOF of Siemens AG, Munich, Germany. This paper was written while Dr. Kaiser was a Visiting Computer Scientist at the Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. Appears in Thirty-Second IEEE Computer Society International Conference, San Francisco, CA, February 1987, pp. 236-241.