An agent-assisted document storage for software process environments

Abstract

Traditional software process environment stores documents using either centralized or distributed approach. With the assistance of web agent, this paper presents a new document storage structure that combines the two approaches. In this new approach, all the documents are stored centrally in web server. When a developer modifies a document (data), agent detects those developers who currently need to refer to that document, and sends the modified data to them in a distributed manner. The benefits of this approach are: 1) All the clients (developers) are notified as soon as a piece of data is modified, 2) The amount of communication is reduced, as clients do not need to check periodically whether or not their currently referred data is modified, 3) The load of server is reduced, as the load of notifying other clients about modification is switched from server to an agent communication media called white board.