A model of planning and enactment support in complex software development projects

Summary form only given. We propose an approach to facilitating not only project enactment but also project planning and monitoring, by tracking all decisions made during project planning and enactment and managing dependencies between these decisions. In order to identify those dependencies relevant for a decision, we established an extendable model of planning and plan enactment, which explicitly describes the activities likely to occur while planning and enacting a software development project, as well as standard dependencies between these activities. We formalized this model by adapting an existing dependency management system, the Redux Model of Design, to record planning and plan enactment decisions and their dependencies. Furthermore, we are currently identifying heuristics to automatically capture typical dependencies, and defining rules to provide automatic planning support where possible. This approach allows to interleave planning and plan enactment, and 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). Thus, we provide extensive support for the process of planning and enacting software development projects, in the form of dependency management, user notifications, and, where possible, automation of selective process steps.