Supporting computer-mediated collaboration through user-defined agents

intelligent aids can be assigned to do useful work, but they can also create annoying interruptions. Thus, questions about how and when to interrupt users are becoming increasing issues for developers of intelligent agents, particularly for systems that must deal with multiple users and multiple contexts. To address some of these issues, this research developed special software that allows groups to customize their help system. The utility of this tool was validated by demonstrating its usefulness in increasing the performance of groups of programmers. Our study shows that groups who customize their software agents will work more effectively.