Telecommunication services are accomplished by cooperative networks of widely distributed communication processes and service users. Those specifications are often modeled by a set of possible message sequences among cooperating processes and users. The distributed and cooperative nature of telecommunication services results in a wide variety of message sequences and makes it more difficult for service designers to design such telecommunication services. To mitigate the difficulty, we propose a design support system with MSRs (message sequence rules) as design knowledge. The system supports the following two design activities: (1) specification of a typical message sequence that corresponds to a service behavior in a successful case, and (2) specification of incidentally possible message sequences that involve service behaviors in successful and unsuccessful cases. For the former activity, the system interacts with designers and identifies the messages they give with MSRs to understand the context of the message sequence and suggest possible subsequent messages. For the latter activity, the system applies MSRs to the typical message sequence and reasons possible messages from/to relevant processes and users under every state to suggest incidentally possible message sequences. Accordingly, designers may be relieved of investigating a wide variety of service behaviors in successful and unsuccessful cases. The system capability is based on MSRs equivalent to reusable message sequence components. MSRs can be obtained through abstraction of implementation-dependent messages and decomposition of those sequences into temporal relations among messages. The rule acquisition method provides MSRs with the potential to generate a wide variety of message sequences. In order to verify rule applicability, we have experimentally designed three kinds of services and conducted an experimental rule application to those specifications. The experimental evaluation results indicate that applicability is fairly high.

In order to lead an ongoing software project to success, it is important to flexibly control its dynamically-changing software process. However, it is generally impossible not only to exactly pre-define the production process but also to prescribe the process change process (meta-process). To solve the problem, we have focused on communication between the project staff through which process change requests presented by individuals can be immediately shared, designed, verified, validated and implemented. This paper proposes a communication model which can represent a wide variety of communication states between the project manager and developers discussing how to implement process change requests. The communication model has been derived by investigating the sort of process change requests and, based on the model, we have implemented a cooperative process planning system (called CooPs). CooPs is a communication environment designed for software projects and supports information sharing for discussing the process change requests. By using CooPs, the software project can flexibly deal with not only expected change requests but also unexpected ones. To evaluate the applicability of the communication model and the capabilities of CooPs, we have conducted an experiment which is an application of CooPs to the ISPW6 example problem. This paper describes the concepts of CooPs, the system implementation, and the experiment.