The Dialogue Engineering Life-Cycle

Software engineering life-cycle models have been around for about 30 years. Various models have been proposed, refined and adapted to the needs of different sub-areas of systems development. Dialogue engineering is a fairly new sub-area of software engineering, commercial spoken language dialogue systems (SLDSs) having been in the market place for only about a decade. While an iterative software engineering life-cycle model may apply to SLDS development at a general level, the model is insufficient at lower levels of detail. To better support SLDSs developers in industry and research, there is a need for a model which specialises software engineering life-cycle modelling to the development and evaluation processes which are specific to SLDSs and their components. This paper describes and illustrates dialogue engineering life-cycle modelling and how to tailor it to the field of SLDSs.