Software project control centers: concepts and approaches

On-line interpretation and visualization of project data are gaining increasing importance on the long road towards predictable and controllable software project execution. In the context of software development, only few techniques exist for supporting these tasks. This is caused particularly by the often insufficient use of engineering principles in the software development domain. Beyond that, interpretation and visualization techniques from other domains (such as business or production processes) are not directly applicable to software processes because of the specific characteristics of software development. A software project control center (SPCC) is a means for collecting, interpreting, and visualizing measurement data in order to provide purposeand role-oriented information to all involved parties (e.g., project manager, quality assurer) during the execution of a project. This article presents a reference model for concepts and definitions around SPCCs. Based on this reference model, a characterization and classification of essential approaches contributing to this field is given. Finally, an outline for future research is derived from identified deficiencies of existing approaches.