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Ivar Jacobson on Software Agents

27 Sep 2005 . tech . Comments #software agents

Todays keynote by Ivar Jacobson was entitled Beyond Agile: Smart.

Ivar, of course, promotes the unified process, and especially the practice of making knowledge explicit. This is, he says what makes his process better than agile methods. Dave Thomas commented to me that it is easy to arrive at such conclusions when you don’t have to do it in practice.

Anyway, the main thing that got my attention (of course) was what Ivar calles the next thing. His idea is that all the information gathered and formalized by (R)UP is a good thing as long as it stays out of our way and is available when we need it. This is an interessting proposition, albeit a bit far fetched. Ivar is actually talking about (and have started developing) intelligent agents to be responsible for this information distribution. He is using software agents as virual pairs to suggest options for you and learn from what you are doing. How about that?

He envisions a set of tools that will let agents play different roles, such as

  • virtual pair project manager
  • virtual pair architect
  • virtual pair designer
  • virtual pair developer and so on...

If you are more interessted in his work on this have a look at the website of his company JacZone.

As far as I can tell, this is all foilware, but it is interessting that these kinds of things pop up.