Providing customized assistance for software lifecycle approaches

The authors describe a tightly coupled environment architecture centered around a customized software development assistant, that uses underlying representations of the software development process, the objects and relationships being manipulated, the functionalities of the tools, and the roles of the various project members to provide automated support for this discipline. The assistant facilitates the interconnection of all the components of the environment. Features of a conceptual modeling language for specifying such representations and using them to generate customized assistants are emphasized