An Ontology-Based Multi-Agent System to Support Requirements Traceability in Multi-Site Software Development Environment

Abstract

With the advent of the Internet, many software companies have adopted the multi-site software development approach that enables project team members to work across multiple sites. A globally dispersed project offers several advantages; however, it creates additional challenges in regard to communication, coordination and information sharing and can lead to the failure of software projects. We propose a conceptual architecture for an ontology-based multi-agent system to provide active support to access software engineering domain knowledge and to recommend software development project captured in the Software Engineering Ontology. The Software Engineering Ontology is used as a communication framework to enable knowledge sharing and reuse while the multi-agent provides the autonomy and the reactive and proactive features to the multi-site software development environment. In this paper we focus on utilizing the proposed framework to support automated requirements traceability tasks. When there is a change in requirement, software agents work cooperatively to trace and identify potentially affected software artifacts and notify the relevant team members to make them aware of any changes.