The Knowledge Based Software Assistant (KBSA) was a research program funded by the United States Air Force.
In the early 1980s the United States Air Force realized that they had received significant benefits from applying artificial intelligence technologies to solving expert problems such as the diagnosis of faults in aircraft.
For example, requirements to use specific programming languages such as Ada or to harden code for real time mission critical fault tolerance.
ISI focused primarily on the front end of the process on defining specifications that could map to logical formalisms but were in formats that were intuitive and familiar to systems analysts.
In addition, Raytheon did a project to investigate informal requirements gathering and Honeywell and Harvard University did work on underlying frameworks, integration, and activity coordination.
Also, in these later stages the emphasis shifted from a pure KBSA approach to more general questions of how to use knowledge-based technology to supplement and augment existing and future computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools.
Companies such as Andersen Consulting (one of the largest system integrators and at the time vendor of their own CASE tool) played a major role in the program in these later stages.
Evolution transformations were developed at approximately the same time as the emergence of the software patterns community and the two groups shared concepts and technology.
The core representation for the knowledge base was meant to utilize the same framework although various layers could be added to support specific presentations and implementations.
The Refine language and environment also proved to be applicable to the problem of software reverse engineering: taking legacy code that is critical to the business but that lacks proper documentation and using tools to analyze it and transform it to a more maintainable form.
In later versions of KBSA such as the Andersen Consulting Concept Demo the specification language was expanded to support message passing as well.
However, when a transformation can radically redraw models with tens or even hundreds of nodes and links the constant updating of the various views becomes a task in itself.
Early research at ISI investigated the feasibility of extracting formal specifications from informal natural language text documents.
This was especially appealing to the air force since by law they required all contractors to generate various reports that describe the system from different points of view.
Researchers at ISI and later Cogentext and Andersen Consulting demonstrated the viability of the approach by using their own technology to generate the documentation required by their air force contracts.