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.

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Abstract

Software development processes are highly creative, and therefore prone to change frequently. Also, recent developments show that most software projects require knowledge and skills in a lot of areas. Since the necessary expertise often cannot be found at one development site, the necessity arises to distribute projects among several sites, or form "virtual" corporations, where software development is shared between several companies. The first point makes it necessary to support changes by identifying and notifying the people affected by a change. The second point emphasizes this necessity, while also complicating project planning and management: changes in one development site or company might necessitate replanning in several locations. In this paper, we introduce the MILOS approach, which provides concepts to integrate process modeling, planning, scheduling and enactment in one system. Thus dynamic plan changes, as well as automated feedback from execution to the project plan can be supported.

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.In this paper, 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.