Sigrid Goldmann

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.

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.

A model of planning and enactment support in complex software development projects

Summary form only given. We propose an approach to facilitating not only project enactment but also project planning and monitoring, by tracking all decisions made during project planning and enactment and managing dependencies between these decisions. In order to identify those dependencies relevant for a decision, we established an extendable model of planning and plan enactment, which explicitly describes the activities likely to occur while planning and enacting a software development project, as well as standard dependencies between these activities. We formalized this model by adapting an existing dependency management system, the Redux Model of Design, to record planning and plan enactment decisions and their dependencies. Furthermore, we are currently identifying heuristics to automatically capture typical dependencies, and defining rules to provide automatic planning support where possible. This approach allows to interleave planning and plan enactment, and to feed enactment data back into the plan, either by automatically reacting to enactment events and plan changes, or by notifying the appropriate person(s). Thus, we provide extensive support for the process of planning and enacting software development projects, in the form of dependency management, user notifications, and, where possible, automation of selective process steps.