Project management for the evolutionary development of expert systems

Summary

Abstract

The development of expert systems is inherently uncertain and so involves a high degree of risk. This paper describes a project management method that helps manage this uncertainty. It has been tailored to the Client Centred Approach — an expert system development method that is being designed for use by small and medium sized enterprises. This context implies that the management technique and its accompanying documentation must not over burden the resources of a smaller developer. The helix method of project management introduced in this paper represents a different view of Boehm's Spiral Model. It accepts that conventional linear project planning methods are not always suitable for developers of expert systems. Having accepted this, the helix method allows plans to be made for each development stage within the Client Centred Approach. We believe the Client Centred Approach is applicable wherever prototyping is used, and we contrast it with the methods being developed by KADS-II.

INTRODUCTION

This paper describes proposals for handling project management within the Client Centred Approach (CCA). The principles of the CCA are described in Basden [1989]. The thinking behind the approach, and its current state of development, are described in greater detail in Basden et al. [1991] and Watson et al. [1992]. Although the technique described here is applicable for any project that uses prototyping to develop a system (around forty five per cent of all commercial expert system projects according to a recent survey [DTI, 1992]), it has been developed specifically for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), rather than larger organisations.