Assisting novice software designers by an expert designer agent

Object-oriented patterns are enjoying much popularity as mechanisms to address flexibility and reusability in object-oriented designs. Consequently, many troubles have appeared to incorporate these practices to novice designers. The selection of appropriate patterns for a given design context is left to the developer’s criterion. This activity can be problematic for the developer, and thus, he/she is amenable for tool assistance. Along this line, this paper proposes the use of interface agents, describing an agent called PatternAdvisor that is able to help a novice developer with the application of design patterns in his/her projects. This agent works on expert knowledge captured in a Bayesian network, which models knowledge from both design pattern catalogs and expert developer’s feedback.