A Model of Planning and Enactment Support in Software Development Projects

In recent years, software development has become increasingly complex as requirements multiplied, and geographically distributed development became necessary and/or desirable. This complicates not only the enactment of software development projects, but also makes project planning and management much more difficult. Especially keeping the plan up to date, and distributing information about changes during project planning as well as plan enactment to everybody concerned, become more difficult with increasing project complexity while at the same time growing in importance. In this paper, we propose an approach to facilitating not only project enactment but also project planning and management, by tracking all decisions made during project planning and enactment, and managing dependencies between these decisions. This allows us 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). We introduce an extendable model of planning and plan enactment that formalizes the dependencies between activities likely to occur during project planning and enactment, and provides the means to specify appropriate actions to be taken during change management.