Granularity Issues in a Knowledge-Based Programming Environment.

This document describes the development of MARVEL, a knowledge-based programming environment that assists multi-programmer software development teams in performing and coordinating their activities. During the design of MARVEL, the authors discovered that the granularity to which logical entities are refined in its software database and the granularity with which its software tools process the entities and report their results to the human users have a strong impact on the degree of intelligence that can be exhibited, as well as on the friendliness and performance of the environment. They describe the many choices among alternative granularities and explain the decisions we made during the design of MARVEL.