Um sistema multi-agente colaborativo para gestão da mudança de requisitos de software

Abstract

Many methodologies were created to organize the software development, most of them based upon the requirements previsibility premise. Since getting a precise set of requirements before the software construction is the exception, it is fundamental to manage the requirements changes. The change management comprises the impact analysis, which identifies the entities affected by a change in a system. The impact analysis is fundamentally supported by the traceability information, which represents the links between the information produced during the software development. The traceability information tends to deteriorate during the project evolution, even in organizations with a high level of maturity in the development process. Software artifacts created in a defined process gets disconnected due to the lack of methods and tools that support the traceability effectively. The actual requirement management tools offer a restricted support to maintain the traceability information. Few of them cover all the software development life cycle, and most of them are not prepared to give the necessary degree of granularity to the traceability information. Finally, most tools are focused on the user action, creating a kind of passivity that makes possible the occurrence of failures in the communication process. These failures may determine the complete project unsuccess. The objective of this work is to improve the requirements change management through the implementation of a web tool. This tool is supported by software agents that control the traceability information with a high degree of granularity and that support the change management and the impact analysis pro-actively through all the software development life cycle. According to the realized study, to make it possible, it is necessary to create a model that supports the representation of the granularity for traceability information, the occurred changes and the generated impacts. In order to test and evaluate the proposed work, it was performed a case study in which the tool was used during the development of a system for management of a education institution.