Task Coordination and Allocation Assistant Project Proposal

Over the past few years, agile development methods steadily gain popularity in the world of software development. Proponents of these lightweight methodologies contends that agile methods are better suited to the fast pace of information technology change than traditional plan-based development methods [1]. However, agile development processes may encounter difficulties in task coordination and allocation on large or distributed teams because of agile methods' inherent need for frequent, informal face-to-face communications. The purpose of the proposed project is to develop a task coordination and allocation method (TCAM) and a task coordination and allocation assistant (TCAA) tool for use in a distributed agile team environment. The rest of this proposal is organized as follows: section 2 presents the current problem in detail; section 3 is a summary of work that is related to the proposed project; section 4 describes the TCAM, the TCAA tool, as well as the experimental methodology to test for the effectiveness of the tool; section 5 explains the benefits of the proposed approach; section 6 outlines the project plan; and section 7 consists of an outline of a master thesis which is based on the project. In a project, organizing tasks and activities is one of the main responsibilities of a project leader or project manager. The project manager needs to determine the-4-tasks that are essential to the achievement of the next milestone (task coordination), and allocate those tasks to team members of different expertise and experience (task allocation). As software development projects are volatile in nature, the project manager needs to revisits those task coordination and allocation decisions frequently in order to account for exceptions, changing requirements and team member feedback. In the task coordination process, the project manager needs to consider milestones (immediate and long-term), state of the artifacts, risks associated with each activity, as well as feedback from team members. Workload, strengths, and area of work of each team members are criteria of consideration in the task allocation process. At present time, the processes of task coordination and task allocation rely on the project manager's intuition and experience. Some agile software development teams adopt the Scrum process [2] as standard practice. In the Scrum process, a team would keep a list of identified tasks, called a backlog. The backlog is constantly updated with new tasks as changes in the project occur. Tasks are prioritized and each team member would commit to a number of …