Experiences from the Design of an Artifact Model for Distributed Agile Project Management

The organization of projects with distributed teams is a demanding task for every project manager. Requirements need to be collected, documented, and discussed, and the resulting tasks must be distributed to the responsible sites. These activities require an efficient and continuous communication. Furthermore, it is necessary to monitor a project and to track its progress from a management perspective. As a solution, we opt for a monitoring strategy that is based on the project artifacts and corresponding reports. For this, we defined in a previous work a generic artifact model for agile methods to enable seamless communication and data exchange between projects and teams. In this paper, we present a concrete instance aiming at providing the backbone of the information and data exchange subsystem of a SaaS-based collaborative project management and governance software for distributed software development. We present the artifact model, give insights into its development, and discuss its feasibility. Our findings show that while the previously defined reference model adequately reflects basic concepts and thus allows for coupling distributed projects, we need to refine the artifact model to emphasize project management/governance and its implementation in tools.