Managing the software development and maintenance process has been identified as a great challenge for several years. Software processes are highly dynamic and can only rarely be planned completely in advance. Dynamic task nets take this into account. They are built and modified incrementally as a software process is executed. Dynamic task nets have been designed t o solve important problems of process dynamics, including product-dependent structural evolution, feedbacks, and concurrent engineering. In order to describe editing and enactment (and their interaction) in a uniform way, task nets are formally defined by means of a programmed graph rewriting system.

Software process dynamics challenge the capabilities of process-centered software engineering environments. Dynamic task nets represent evolving software processes by hierarchically organized nets of tasks which are connected by control, data, and feedback flows. Project managers operate on dynamic task nets in order to assess the current status of a project, trace its history, perform impact analysis, handle feedback, adapt the project plan to changed product structures, etc. Developers are supported through task agendas and provision of tools and documents. Chained tasks may be executed in parallel (simultaneous engineering), and cooperation is controlled through releases of document versions. Dynamic task nets are formally specified by a programmed graph rewriting system. Operations on task nets are specified declaratively by graph rewrite rules at a high level of abstraction. Furthermore, editing, analysis, and execution steps on a dynamic task net, which may be interleaved seamlessly, are described in a uniform formalism.

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