Formally founded, plan-based enactment of software development processes

The management of a software development project is a demanding task. To plan and control the actions of the project participants, the existence of a suitable project plan is of critical importance. However, elaborating and maintaining such a project plan based on the employed process model typically requires a lot of manual effort, comprising many tedious and error-prone activities. This paper shows how plan-based enactment of processes can improve this situation, providing a basis for adequate method and tool support. The paper presents our approach for an integrated formal model covering process models, project plans and real life project actions. The model is simple, has a well-defined semantics and supports initial planning as well as plan refinement, re-planning and controlling. Furthermore, the paper sketches how the model can be put to practice and integrated into existing tools.