ARARA - A collaborative tool to requirement change awarenes

This paper describes a collaborative tool, ARARA (Artifacts and Requirements Awareness Reinforcement Agents), that provides awareness in Software Development Process (SDP). Ontologies support this application for they are used by project team members when preparing the artifacts, propagating the concepts through them, and used by agents as knowledge base to retrieve information, tag the artifacts, detect changes, and search for linked artifacts that may be affected by a change on a previous artifact. This collaborative tool can improve team members awareness automatically no matter where they are geographically working, once agents are responsible for tracking and notifying requirements, or any other changes, to team members, including consequent candidates for modifications. Keywords-tools for CSCW; awareness; agents; ontology; traceability