Enabling open software project management data with antipatterns

Abstract

Antipatterns describe commonly occurring solutions to problems that generate negative consequences. By defining a vocabulary of terms for commonly occurring problematic processes and implementations within organisations, antipatterns help in the identification of poor design decisions and offer suggestions on how software can be refactored or improved. Seventeen years have passed since the first publication on Software Project Management (SPM) Antipatterns. Over this period of time a considerable amount of literature has been published on SPM Antipatterns and a significant amount of antipatterns has been listed and documented on Web pages. Despite the fact that a significant body of antipattern research focuses on the identification and documentation of new antipatterns, difficulties associated with SPM antipattern searches on research databases (i.e. the ACM Portal, IEEE Xplore, the Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar) are still being reported in the relevant literature. Furthermore, leveraging from the antipatterns that are listed on Web pages and consolidating them in a single knowledge base with open access remains an open issue. This paper presents a set of tools that transform SPM antipatterns to open SPM data in order to overcome the difficulties associated with detecting and using SPM antipatterns. The common characteristic of these tools is the open data architecture that is achieved with a combination of Semantic Web, Web Interface and Open Source technologies that allows open access to SPM antipattern data, collaborative development of antipatterns, as well as intelligent detection of antipatterns that exist in software projects. These tools have lead to the creation of good quality SPM antipattern data that can be easily accessed via the Web.