The Prompter Project

Welcome to the homepage of the P3 (Project and Process Prompter) project

Project Acronym	P3
Title	Project and Process Prompter
Objectives	The P3 project intends to develop a prototype tool, Prompter, which can be used to assist project planners in deciding: What resources will be needed for their project? What parameters need to be measured during the course of the project? What trade-offs in project variables could lead to reduced risk and greater chance of success?
Funding	European Commission - Fourth Framework Programme
Duration	1996 - 1999
Partners	Dublin City University (Ireland) Catalyst Software (Ireland) Objectif Technologie (France) Schneider Electric (France) Intracom (Greece)

What is prompter?

Prompter is a decision support tool for project planning. A project's characteristics can be set through an extensive set of checklists, along with the selection of a life cycle and other parameters. This information then drives a "knowledge base" which critiques this proposed project and advises on risk issues or makes recommendations on good practice. Each project can support a complex tree of scenarios, each containing a different set of defined parameters, thus allowing a detailed form of 'what-if' analysis by cross-comparison between the scenarios. The relevant data from the chosen scenario can then be exported to MS Project or a comparable tool for detailed scheduling. There is also an accompanying Handbook on good practice for software project planning.

Prompter Tool - An Overview

Prompter is a Decision Support Tool for Software Project Planning
Provides active advice for software project planners based on the parameters of the target project:-
- Issues which pose risk to the project; and
- Relevant pointers to good practice in software engineering.
Scenario Manager. Another of the powerful features of Prompter is the ability to create many different scenarios for a single project. The advice relating to each scenario can then be compared, before making a final decision on the 'live' project. The tool can manage a complex hierarchy of scenarios within a project.
Export Data in MS Project format to other tools
Handbook of good practice for Software Project Planning - supplied with Prompter, both on-line through the help files, and also in PDF format for printing
Enhancement of knowledge base: The structure of the knowledge allows Catalyst, or other software engineering experts, to improve and enhance it over time in order to keep up the the current state of the art in software engineering best practice.
For a detailed guide to the Prompter tool click here

Prompter related publications

Technical Reports

"The development of an Agent Based Critiquing System Architecture for a project management tool: Prompter",E.Gaffney, T.Moynihan & R.O’Connor, Technical Report CA0199, Dublin City University, 1999.
"A Distributed Framework for Implementing a Multi-agent Assistant System", R.O'Connor & E.Gaffney, Technical Report CA1198, Dublin City University, 1998
"Intelligent Assistance for Software Project Management", R.O’Connor, Technical Report CA-3797 CA3797, Dublin City University, 1997.
"PROMPTER - A Decision Support Tool for Software Project Management", R.O'Connor, T.Moynihan, T.Renault & A.Combelles, Technical Report CA-2997, Dublin City University, 1997.

Conference Papers

"An Agent Model of Decision Support for Software Project Management", R.O'Connor & T.Moynihan, To appear in Proceedings of 12th International Conference on System Research, Informatics & Cybernetics, Baden-Baden, Germany, July 2000.
"A Multi-Agent Approach to Project Planning", R.O'Connor, E.Gaffney & T.Moynihan, Proceedings of EXPERSYS-98 conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications, Virginia, USA, November 1998.
"A Multi-Agent Approach to Knowledge Base Implementation", R.O'Connor, Proceedings of International Postgraduate Research Student Conference, Dublin, November 1998.
"Designing an Internet Enabled Decision Support Tool in the Domain of Software Project Management", R.O'Connor & T.Renault, In Proceedings of International Symposium on Engineering of Intelligent Systems, Spain, 1998.
"Prompter - A Decision Support Tool using Distributed Intelligent Agents", R.O'Connor, T.Renault, C.Floch, T.Moynihan & A.Combelles, In Proceedings of EXPERSYS-97 conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications, Sunderland, UK, 1997.
"Prompter - A Decision Support Tool using Distributed Intelligent Agents", R.O'Connor, T.Renault, C.Floch, T.Moynihan & A.Combelles, In Proceedings of EXPERSYS-97 conference on Artificial Intelligence Applications, Sunderland, UK, 1997.

Thesis

R.O'Connor, "An Architecture for an Intelligent Assistant System for use in Software project Planning", Ph.D. Thesis, City University (London), 2000.
E. Gaffney, "The Development of an Agent Based Critiquing System Architecture for a Project Managament Tool: Prompter", M.Sc. Thesis, Dublin City University, 1999.

Posters

"Prompter - A Project Planning Assistant", R.O’Connor, R.Cochran & T.Moynihan, 22nd International Conference on Software Engineering, Limerick, Ireland, June, 2000.

Other Prompter sites

Page maintained by Rory O'Connor. Last updated on May 22, 2000