A deontic formalism for co-ordinating software development in virtual software corporations

The concept of the Virtual Software Corporation (VSC) has recently become a practical reality as a result of advances in communication and distributed technologies. However, there are significant difficulties with the management of the software development process within a VSC. The main problem is the significantly increased communicational complexity of the process model for such developments. The more classic managerial hierarchy is generally replaced by a "flatter" network of commitments. Therefore new solution approaches are required to provide the necessary process support. The purpose of the paper is to present a solution approach which models the process based on deontic logic. The approach has been developed and validated against a case study where it was used to model commitments and inter-human communications within the software development process of a VSC. The use of the formalism is exemplified through a prototype system using a layered multi agent architecture.