Solomon: A Management Metrics Decision System

An innovative approach is proposed to improve management decision-making in the development and support of mission-critical software systems. This effort will define a management metrics decision system that will support both metrics process setup and in-process decision support. Innovative aspects include using an open tool architecture to facilitate environment integration, rule-based technology and experience-based case histories to represent the user-extensible knowledge-base of decision alternatives, and management game playing to support both user training and expert decision capture. We also propose an innovative program postmortem analysis capability to augment the game playing decision capture and to capture "20-20" handsight assessments of the decisions made and possible alternatives. Phase I objectives target three challenges in the realization of the envisioned system: (1) address management decisions that relate to metrics process setup and tailoring; (2) use nonobtrusive knowledge capture techniques to support ver-extensibility of the knowledge-base of decision alternatives; and (3) provide intuitive, user-friendly application of the knowledge-base, in conjunction with measurement data and metrics analysis results, to support decision-making. Phase I will investigate solutions to these challenges and define the Phase II development approach.