Gilson Yukio Sato

Agent and multi-agent applications to support distributed communities of practice: a short review

This paper concerns the relationship between agents or multi-agent systems and distributed communities of practice. It presents a review of a number of agent and multi-agent applications with features that could contribute to supporting distributed communities of practice. The association is promising because of features like autonomy, pro-activity, flexibility or ability to integrate systems that characterize agents and multi-agent systems. Furthermore, such an association is a step towards building mixed communities of humans and artificial agents. To understand how agents and multi-agent systems could answer some of the needs of distributed communities of practice, we organize the analyzed applications into five different categories defined by considering the main activities of a community, namely: Individual Participation, Synchronous Interactions, Asynchronous Interactions, Publishing and Community Cultivation. Such a classification helps us identify the relevant features of the current technology and determine some that should be further developed, e.g. to support community coordination or gather information related to virtual communities. For each application we selected, we present its main approach and point out its potential interest.

An architecture for supporting small collocated teams in cooperative software development

Most CSCW and groupware systems focus the activities of distributed teams involved in large projects by means of tools for communication and awareness. The activities of small collocated teams are often neglected. Analyzing preliminary requirements of small teams, it is possible to observe the need of tools to help the elaboration of project documentation. This paper presents a multi-agent system architecture to support software development in small collocated teams. The architecture proposed in this paper tackles the problem of elaborating documentation, by facilitating the elaboration of the Small Project Management Plan [1]. Tools used in the software development are encapsulated by agents that extract and organize useful information for the elaboration of such a document.

Supporting small teams in cooperatively building application domain models

Building application domain models is a time-consuming activity in software engineering. In small teams, it is an activity that involves almost all participants, including developers and domain experts. In our approach, we support the knowledge engineering activity by reusing tagging done by team participants when they search information on the Web about the applications domain. Team participants collaborate implicitly when they do tagging because their individually created tags are collected and form a folksonomy. This folksonomy reflects their knowledge about the domain and it is the base for eliciting domain model elements in the knowledge acquisition and conceptualization tasks in a consensual way. Experiments provide evidence that our approach helps team participants to build richer domain models than if they do not use our software tool. The tool allows the reuse of simple annotations as long as users learn about the applications domain.

MODUS-SD: User modeling in collaborative software development

During the software development cycle, artifacts (source-code, documentation, user manuals, etc.) are written, most of them, cooperatively. Each participant in a software development team plays a specific role, but may write an artifact cooperatively with participants playing different roles. In large and distributed teams the roles are well-defined and mainly respected. In small teams however, a participant may perform different roles simultaneously. We have already proposed the architecture of a system (called CSCW-SD) to support small collocated teams developing software. We are now adding to CSCW-SD a module, called MODUS-SD, capable of modeling users. In this paper we present this module, how it was implemented and present a case study, with preliminary results, in the context of modeling Java developers in a collaborative software development team.

A semi-automatic source code documentation method for small software development teams

Software developers often face the task of documenting source code. For many of them, documenting code development is a boring task. However, source code documentation is an important task, especially when dealing with groups of developers. An updated documentation allows group members to have greater visibility on what has been and is being developed, allowing the reuse of source code. This research aims at designing, developing and validating a semi-automatic documentation method for source code from the existing design documentation on a particular project being developed by a small team, as well as updating this documentation from information gathered from the source code under development. It is understood as design documentation, those documents or parts of documents that are linked directly to the code under construction.

CoPBoard: A Catalyst for Distributed Communities of Practice

Symbiotic computing leads to a proliferation of computing devices that allow linking people, favoring the development of distributed Communities of Practice CoPs. Their members, being dispersed geographically, have to rely strongly on technological means to interact. In this context, coordinating distributed CoPs is more challenging than coordinating their collocated counterparts. Hence, the increasing role of the coordination should be supported by an adequate set of coordination tools. In this article, we present an approach based on multi-agent systems for coordinating distributed CoPs. It includes analyzing the exchanges among members and translating this information into a graphical format to help the coordinators to follow the evolution of the participation and the domain of the community.

Towards a Multi-Agent System Application to Support Communities of Practice

This paper presents a preliminary analysis of some possibilities to apply multi agent systems to support Communities of Practice. Firstly, we present some basic issues on Communities of Practice including a definition, a couple of cases and the concepts of identities, trajectories and multi-membership. Then, we analyze the adequacy of the multi agent systems technology to support Communities of Practice. After this, we show how some characteristics of Communities of Practice can suggest different applications of multi agent systems. Finally, we explore one of the identified possibilities, more specifically the one related with a members trajectory into and inside a community

Dialog construction in a collaborative project management environment

In this paper, we discuss the construction of dialogs for Personal Assistant Agents that are in charge of the interface between users and a Multi-Agent System. Such a system aims at providing support for small teams developing software collaboratively. These small teams have specific needs such as the integration of free or open-source tools or the support to elaborate project documentation. Considering such specific needs, we have elaborated a Multi-Agent architecture that has been implemented using a platform called OMAS. We present the structure that OMAS offers to handle dialogs with users and discuss some implementation details. We also describe some of the dialogs that represent interactions between members of small software development teams and their Personal Assistant Agents. We consider that the use of Personal Assistant Agents can help small teams to handle documentation issues in an integrated and undemanding way.

Pedagogic coherence in virtual didactic authoring communities

Although good content correctness can be observed on the web, one may have difficulty finding a set of entries covering a complete syllabus of a course with a coherent pedagogic approach. We conducted an experiment to test the hypothesis if a collection of didactic contents can be discussed, distributed and produced by an online community of teachers sharing the same subject of interest. The ¿negotiation of meaning¿, a concept present in the Communities of Practice Model, inspired the design of this experiment, which evolves in a virtual environment, rendering possible the exchange of ideas on didactic material judged necessary for class use. We present the main lines of the method as well as the results obtained from 39 grade school teachers divided in seven groups. The results showed that the adoption of activities in the method aroused in the participants a high level of satisfaction in relation to the didactic content they had produced; despite their lack of experience dealing with virtual environments.

COMENTE+: A TOOL FOR IMPROVING SOURCE CODE DOCUMENTATION USING INFORMATION RETRIEVAL

Document source code is seen as a boring time consuming task by several developers. However, a welldocumented source code, allow developers to have a better visibility into what was and is being develo ped, helping, for example, the reuse of the code. This s tudy presents a semi-automatic method for documentation of source code from the existing artifacts in a sof tware project under development. The method aims to reduce developer’s workload, allowing them to work on other tasks of the project and/or ensure that th e project deadlines will be met. The method, implemented in a tool, called Comente+, is capable of creating or updating comments into a source code fr om gathered information recovered from the project artifacts. To implement Comente+, we used an information retrieval approach. We performed some experiments with real data to validate this approac h. For that, we created a special measure that esti mates how well documented a source code is.