Abstract

This thesis records the research component involved when constructing a set of templates that describe the typical software development project. This set of templates is a major component in the Prompter tool. The Prompter tool was developed by a consortium of software developers including Dublin City University, Catalyst Software and Objectif Technologie. The development of Prompter has been partially assisted under the ESSI fourth framework. Its goal is to provide decision support to the user in the field of Software Project Planning. In the Prompter tool the user provides a detailed description of the starting point of their project. This detailed description is used to provide recommendations by a built-in critiquing system. This value of this advice is based upon the accuracy and relevance of the data that the user provides. This research had two mam objectives. The first of which was to consolidate a representation mechanism that is flexible enough to provide Prompter with a detailed description of a user project. The second objective was to research the state of the average software project and attempt to categorise these typical software projects according to size and complexity. If these projects are deemed to overlap sufficiently, these common characteristics can be added to a model describing all software projects that are operating withm these constramts. These characteristics can then be added to the tool using the description mechanism described above.