Development of an Intelligent Agent-Based GQM Software Measurement System

Software measurement plays a key role in quantitative software engineering. Effective implementation of a measurement system to map collected data to business goals in a software organization is a prime problem. Goal-Question-Metrics (GQM) measurement provides the guidelines. A number of techniques to implement the GQM process have already been proposed. Nevertheless, the GQM process is complex, knowledge-intensive, iterative and therefore expensive. A tool to automate the process will be quite helpful. This paper introduces a multi-agent system called ISMS, which is designed for providing intelligent aid for software measurement based on GQM technique. The objective of developing this intelligent system is to automate the GQM process by building an agentbased system that accepts at its input a user’s business goal, asks questions interactively and after a few iterations produces a software measurement plan at its output. This multiagent system is composed of two clusters of agents, client-side assistant agents and server-side cooperative agents. The client-side agents work as intelligent front-end for the users and the server-side agents work cooperatively to realize various roles necessary to implement the GQM process.