A Review on Software Project Management Ontologies

Abstract

This article aims to provide the reader with a comprehensive background for understanding current knowledge and research works on ontologies for software project management (SPM). It constitutes a systematic literature review behind key objectives of the potential adoption of ontologies in PM. Ontology development and engineering could facilitate substantially the software development process and improve knowledge management, software and artifacts reusability, internal consistency within project management processes of various phases of software life cycle. The authors examined the literature focusing on software project management ontologies and analyzed the findings of these published papers and categorized them accordingly. They used qualitative methods to evaluate and interpret findings of the collected studies. The literature review, among others, has highlighted lack of standardization in terminology and concepts, lack of systematic domain modeling and use of ontologies mainly in prototype ontology systems that address rather limited aspects of software project management processes.