Towards an Intelligent Systems Software Process Infrastructure for early SDLC

Abstract

A major customer demand in the software industry today is quality at speed. Systems and Software Development Lifecycle processes (SDLC) are central to the work in IT Organizations that guide product and service development and act as vehicles for building the engineering deliverables. Despite adopting standard processes, IT organizations continue to face enormous quality-related challenges in developing engineering deliverables. More specifically, early SDLC phases such as proposals, requirements are document-centric and manually intensive. The technology and automation paradigms are under-exploited, and a huge gap exists in process infrastructure support for the early SDLC. newlineArtificial Intelligence (AI) in SDLC is an emerging area of research with a focus on applying intelligent tools and techniques to improve/ accelerate/ disrupt the life cycle. As part of the AI in SDLC paradigm, technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), rule-based reasoning are widely explored. This thesis proposes a generic intelligent Systems/ software Process INfrastructure (iSPIN) framework focusing on extracting solution knowledge into machine-processable models and building intelligent recommender systems for a given problem in the early phases of SDLC. The major contribution of this work is the iSPIN framework with crucial building blocks to build an intelligent process infrastructure. A set of technology enablers are proposed comprising an SDLC System meta-meta-model, AI-based knowledge extraction, and intelligent solution recommender. iSPIN technology is implemented and validated as part of two early SDLC processes - i) For automatically generating a Response to a client-supplied Request for Proposal (RFP) ii) For generating context-sensitive user stories from diverse Requirements Specifications. The iSPIN framework and technology can help pave the way towards realizing the dictums of Quality at Speed and Digital transformation of SDLC Processes newline