Knowledge Provisioning: A Context-sensitive Process-oriented Approach Applied to Software Engineering Environments

Software development is a complex, dynamic, and highly intellectual process that provides automation challenges in the areas of process and knowledge management. Moreover, the ability to support the context-sensitive provisioning of knowledge is further exacerbated by the rapidly changing technologies, processes, knowledge, practices, methods, and tool chains that software engineering involves. Thus, the effective and timely provisioning of knowledge and its concrete utilization in the software development process remains problematic. Reasons for this include the need to ascertain the context, to be aware of the process, and to reason and select the appropriate knowledge to provision while abiding by human and other constraints. For such dynamic knowledge and process environments, this paper describes an approach for realizing a knowledge-based system that automatically provisions knowledge aligned with both the actual context (user, process, and project) and with automated workflow governance. To demonstrate the feasibility of the approach, a scenario-based application of the implementation to the software engineering domain is shown.