A Metric-Based Multi-Agent System for Software Project Management

Software project management (SPM) is one of the primary factors to software success or failure. Software projects often fail because the managers do not know true project status. Software project planning can be one of the most critical activities in the SPM process. Without a realistic and objective software project plan, the software development process cannot be managed in an effective way. This paper presents a metric based multi-agent system, software project planning associate (SPPA), to assist managers in understanding and visualizing SPM process defined in a software project plan. SPPA consists of intelligent agents developed in the Java programming language and JESS (Java expert system shell) to assist a software project manager in objectively initializing a software project plan, refining/improving a plan, organizing, staffing, scheduling, measuring, visualizing, controlling, tracking, predicting, and data collecting. The resources, tasks, schedules, and milestones of the software project are described in a generic metric based software project plan. As software development process evolves, metrics are unobtrusively gathered and compliance to the plan is reported by intelligent agents. Software process effectiveness predictions are made and recommendations are dynamically reported by multi intelligent agents suggesting the software development that should be executed to best comply with the software project plan.