A Knowledge-Based Software Development Environment Supporting Cooperative Work

The subject of this paper is the description of a process-centered software development environment called MERLIN which monitors and guides teams of software developers and managers in producing software objects. Software objects (or objects for short) include all sorts of documents like requirements analysis, design, code, user manuals, contracts etc. For each user, MERLIN automatically displays a specific working context which contains information like objects, their relations, their current development state, and corresponding tools. This information is filtered according to the (access) rights and duties a particular user has in a particular project, i.e. the working context depends on the user's role (e.g. programmer, designer, manager). Internally, the computation of the information to be contained in a working context, is based on a rulelike definition of a software process and a flexible interpretation mechanism to enact such a process definition. The main feature of the interpreter is an alternating use of backward and forward chaining for the interpretation of rules. In addition, our implementation enables a persistent storage and incremental update during runtime of all process information expressed in facts within the MERLIN knowledge base.