An adaptable generation approach to agenda management

As software engineering efforts move to more complex, distributed environments, coordinating the activities of people and tools becomes very important. While groupware systems address user level communication needs and distributed computing technologies address tool level communication needs, few attempts have been made to synthesize the common needs of both. This paper describes our attempt to do exactly that. We describe a framework for generating an agenda management system (AMS) from a specification of the system's requirements. The framework can meet a variety of requirements and produces a customized AMS appropriate for use by both humans and software tools. The framework and generated system support evolution in several ways, allowing existing systems to be extended as requirements change. We also describe our experiences using this approach to create an AMS to support a process programming environment.