Coordinating management activities in distributed software development projects

Abstract

Coordinating distributed processes, especially engineering and software design processes, has been a research topic for some time now. Several approaches have been published that aim at coordinating large projects in general, and large software development processes specifically. However most of these approaches focus on the technical part of the design process and omit management activities like planning and scheduling the project, or monitoring it during execution. We focus on coordinating the management activities that accompany the technical software design process. We state the requirements for a Software Engineering Environment (SEE), accommodating management, and we describe a possible architecture for such an SEE.