Programmer's Apprentice (Acm Press Frontier Series)

Where will the next order of magnitude improvement in software productivity come from? In this book, two leading researchers at MIT answer this question by describing the Programmer's Apprentice, a powerful new approach to computer-aided software engineering (CASE) that combines artificial intelligence and software engineering techniques. The Programmer's Apprentice is an intelligent assistant for software engineers that will provide advice, catch errors, and take care of routine details throughout the software process, from requirements acquisition to implementation and maintenance. Rich and Waters use extensive illustrations and transcripts from a demonstration system to make the principles and methods underlying the Programmer's Apprentice methods understandable to both researchers and engineers. In the concluding chapter, they give specific examples of how to apply ideas from the Programmer's Apprentice to the next generation of CASE tools. This book will give software professionals and CASE tool designers a glimpse of what to expect in the future of software development. It will also inspire researchers and students in both artificial intelligence and software engineering by showing the results of synergy between these two disciplines.