Transaction Graphs: A Sketch Formalism for Activity Coordination

Abstract
A primary objective of the Knowledge-Based Software Assistant is the automated coordination of all activities comprising the software development process. This automated activities coordination will provide support for managing communications and enforcing policy in software development projects while at the same time enabling automation of the software process. The purpose of transaction graphs is to serve as a formal basis for an implementation of an activity coordination system. The essential idea is that a transaction graph specifies a distributed computation, which serves as a mircocosm of the real- world activities being coordinated. The nodes of the graph correspond to activities, and acrs serve to specify interactions between activities. Transaction graphs are closed under certain operations and are composable in natural ways. These properties make them a suitable foundation for the detailed design and implementation of tools that aid in coordination. This report addresses how the form alism can be applied to issues such as user interfaces to the system, intuitive means of specifying patterns of coordination.

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