Evolving distributed software engineering environments

Abstract

For a software engineering environment to be useful for the development process, it must provide a complete set of tools to assist the software development tasks. The tools focus on separate issues of a highly integrated problem and, in general, must be capable of assisting one another in the midst of intelligently pursuing their own goals for improving the software products. These tools must address the truly significant portion of the software-engineering task: evolution of existing software. The requirements of the tool set change as we learn more about the development process; therefore, the tools need the ability to be added, removed, substituted, and modified. More than that, the tools' requirements evolve as the software products that they operate on evolve. We meet these needs by providing the tool set as a distributed community of autonomous learning agents. The SWEEP system is part of the ongoing Software Service Bay project at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of Wayne State University that addresses these issues.