This work aims to provide a framework, using concepts and technologies from multiagent systems research and open source software, to face the challenges concerning both knowledge and development management of a software system.

The main thesis is:

Open Source Software is a good match/model for the investigated problem, as it is open, all the aspects of the software development can be accessed and
Multiagent systems provides concepts to give a consistent and well integrated, yet decoupled, framework for the investigated problem.
To pursue the aforementioned aim, the work starts with some definitions of the problem domain, mainly what are a software system, knowledge management and software development management. Then a brief description of the problem relating to the specific case study (TuCSoN) it is provided. Moreover the concrete example provides a set of use cases to validate work propositions against. After that the work delves in more detail into the context of distributed and open source software development: best practices, technologies, and taking a quick look at the so-called "social software". An overview of Lifestreams Software Architecture comes to end the survey of state-of-art / visionary concepts about knowledge and software development management.

Next, melting down the previously portrayed concepts, a sketchy architecture is proposed, it takes Lifestreams one step further, from personal information management to cooperative knowledge management. TuCSoN infrastructure is used in the prototype implementation, and thus a porting of the Lifestreams architecture to TuCSoN is carried out. Finally the proposed system is validated against the use cases. Ending conclusions come.