Harald Holz

Merging project planning and Web enabled dynamic workflow technologies

The MILOS system supports dynamic coordination of distributed software development teams by integrating project planning and workflow technologies over the Internet. The three-tiered Java architecture enables plan refinements to be made on the fly, and a change management component automatically creates traceability relationships between project entities.

Knowledge Management Support for Distributed Agile Software Processes

Agile Software Development has put a new focus on the question of how to share knowledge among members of software development teams. In contrast to heavy-weight, document-centric approaches, agile approaches rely on face-to-face communication for knowledge transfer. Pure face-to-face communication is not feasible when applying agile processes in a virtual team setting. In this paper, we argue that the right approach for virtual software development teams using agile methods lies between a radical “none but source code” standpoint, and the multitude of documents proposed by heavy-weight development standards. This paper introduces work on developing a system for the task-based capture and pro-active distribution of recurrent information needs that typically arise for developers, as well as potential ways to satisfy these information needs. Our approach facilitates an incremental organizational learning process to capture and maintain knowledge on what documentation/information is actually needed, such that documentation is created on an “as needed” basis.

Task-Specific Knowledge Management in a Process-Centred SEE

This paper discusses how a process-centered knowledge management and coordination support approach can be used to create learning software organizations. We describe our extensions to the software engineering environment MILOS that allow us to model and interpret information needs that occur during project planning and enactment; this enables MILOS to automatically provide users with task-specific information. In order to capture actual information needs, we propose an extended feedback loop to update the process model stored in an experience base. The result is a knowledge management approach that is process-oriented and supports continuous process improvement.

Integrating Process Support and Knowledge Management for Virtual Software Development Teams

In this paper we describe how knowledge management and software process support can be integrated to improve the efficiency of virtual software teams. The approach presented here integrates a process enactment environment with an on-demand knowledge delivery strategy that is based on parameterized information needs models. The parameters in the information needs models are bound at project execution time to values extracted from the process enactment engine. Thus, the approach supports virtual teams by establishing a platform for systematic and task-specific knowledge exchange. The proposed approach is prototypically implemented in the MILOS system, an open source project of the University of Calgary (Canada) and the University of Kaiserslautern (Germany).

Coordinating management activities in distributed software development projects

Coordinating distributed processes, especially engineering and software design processes, has been a research topic for some time now. Several approaches have been published that aim at coordinating large projects in general, and large software development processes specifically. However most of these approaches focus on the technical part of the design process and omit management activities like planning and scheduling the project, or monitoring it during execution. We focus on coordinating the management activities that accompany the technical software design process. We state the requirements for a Software Engineering Environment (SEE), accommodating management, and we describe a possible architecture for such an SEE.

Leveraging passive paper piles to active objects in personal knowledge spaces

Office workers tend to produce paper piles of documents to read or to process sometime later. The information contained in these piles is often lost if it is not transferred to electronic format and connected to knowledge structures. Information that is not part of the knowledge worker’s electronic information space is frequently overlooked because it is not proactively provided during actual processes or tasks he is involved in. This paper presents a novel prototype for an intelligent office appliance, which results from an integration of three state-of-the-art office applications/appliances: a workflow system, a document classification system, and a multi-functional peripheral. The resulting system allows for leveraging an office worker’s papers to her personal knowledge space in order to realize a pro-active and context-sensitive information support within knowledge-intensive tasks and processes.

Knowledge management for distributed agile processes: models, techniques, and infrastructure

This report summarizes presentations and discussions of the IEEE WETICE 2003 Workshop on Knowledge Management for Distributed Agile Processes. The main goals of the workshop were to bring together practitioners and researchers from the areas of Knowledge Management and Agile Processes from different domains to discuss the current state of ongoing research efforts and to share practical experiences with adaptation of modern Knowledge Management techniques by agile teams.

A meta-model for distributed software development

Software development processes are highly creative, and subject to frequent changes, making it hard to plan and schedule these processes in advance. Also, distributed projects cannot be planned centrally, especially if the involved parties are individual companies with their own areas of responsibility (as is the case in virtual software corporations). On the other hand, certain aspects of the overall plan and schedule (milestones & deadlines, project progress) need to be available to all concerned parties. We present an approach to support distributed planning and scheduling, as well as the subsequent (also distributed) plan execution, in one system. The approach enables us to support interleaved planning and plan enactment, allowing the user to change the plan and schedule while the project is already under way. This facilitates the task of keeping the plan up to date, avoiding the complete invalidation of the plan as is often the case in conventional projects soon after enactment has started.

Research on Learning Software Organizations - Past, Present, and Future

In order for a software organization to stay competitive, its software development needs to be part of organizational change. The organization’s ability to change and to adapt quickly to environmental changes provides a foundation for growth and power [7]. For such changes to happen, the learning capabilities of the organization have to be enhanced, being an essential part of producing more effective and efficient work practices. Moreover, continuous learning is essential for surviving – let alone prospering – in dynamic and competitive environments [15]. The Learning Software Organization (LSO) workshop series has been promoting this vision since 1999, addressing the questions of organizational learning from the software development point of view.

An incremental approach to task-specific information delivery in SE processes

In this paper, we present a system to proactively provide software process participants with information items that are available and relevant in the context of their current tasks. Knowledge on which items to offer is obtained in two ways. First, situation-specific information needs that arise for participants are captured, together with the information sources that are accessed to satisfy them. These are recommended to other participants in similar situations using collaborative filtering techniques. Second, to allow for more systematic recommendation functionality, a formal language is provided to specify preconditions on when to offer certain information items. The resulting hybrid system thus supports an incremental phase-in of knowledge management techniques into an organization, allowing the organization to decide how much effort to spend on knowledge engineering.