A Knowledge-Based Environment for Modeling and Simulating Software Engineering Processes

We describe the design and representation schemes used in constructing a prototype computational environment for modeling and simulating multi-agent software engineering processes. We refer to this environment as the Articulator. We provide an overview of the Articulator's architecture which identiies ve principal components. Three of these components, the knowledge meta-model, the software process behavior simulator, and a knowledge base querying mechanism are detailed and examples are included. The conclusion reiterates what is novel to this approach in applying knowledge engineering techniques to the problems of understanding the statics and dynamics of complex software engineering processes.