Supporting Knowledge Reuse During the Software Maintenance Process through Agents

Knowledge management has become an important topic as organisations wish to take advantage of the information that they produce and that can be brought to bear on important decisions. This work describes a system to manage and reuse the information (and knowledge) generated during the software maintenance process, which consumes a large part of the software lifecycle costs. The architecture of the system is formed of a set of agent communities. Each community manages different types of knowledge. The communities’ agents have the goal of encouraging the reuse of good solutions and taking advantage of information obtained from previous experience. In consequence, the software maintenance is made easier and there are less costs and effort. To achieve this goal, agents use several reasoning techniques such as case based reasoning or decision tree based algorithms which allow them to generate new knowledge from the information that they manage.