Towards Conversational Development Environments: Using Theory-of-Mind and Multi-Agent Architectures for Requirements Refinement
This addresses the problem of requirements refinement for software developers, offering a novel approach that could improve the software development process, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing FM capabilities.
The paper tackles the challenge of using Foundation Models to accurately capture stakeholder requirements in software development by introducing AlignMind, a multi-agent system with Theory-of-Mind capabilities, which demonstrated accurate intent and requirement capture across 150 diverse use cases.
Foundation Models (FMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language tasks. However, their ability to accurately capture stakeholder requirements remains a significant challenge for using FMs for software development. This paper introduces a novel approach that leverages an FM-powered multi-agent system called AlignMind to address this issue. By having a cognitive architecture that enhances FMs with Theory-of-Mind capabilities, our approach considers the mental states and perspectives of software makers. This allows our solution to iteratively clarify the beliefs, desires, and intentions of stakeholders, translating these into a set of refined requirements and a corresponding actionable natural language workflow in the often-overlooked requirements refinement phase of software engineering, which is crucial after initial elicitation. Through a multifaceted evaluation covering 150 diverse use cases, we demonstrate that our approach can accurately capture the intents and requirements of stakeholders, articulating them as both specifications and a step-by-step plan of action. Our findings suggest that the potential for significant improvements in the software development process justifies these investments. Our work lays the groundwork for future innovation in building intent-first development environments, where software makers can seamlessly collaborate with AIs to create software that truly meets their needs.