Software project control is an essential component for project success. The basis of all control approaches is roughly the same: the collection and effective usage of measurement data to allow for quantitative decision making. But many organisations have problems with establishing project control mechanisms. On the one hand, this has something to do with the complexity of today’s software development projects; that is, the number of people involved, the number of distributed development locations, the number and difficulty of functional and non-functional (quality) requirements, as well the experience of the people controlling and steering the project. On the other hand, quantitative project control mechanisms have to be widely accepted within an organisation and have to be part of daily life in order to assure high-quality and up-to-date data for project control. This requires the integration of control mechanisms into the development process as well as strategies on how to introduce controlling mechanisms and provide training in how to use them efficiently. Software cockpits, also known as Software Project Control Centers, support the management and controlling of software and system development projects and provide a single point of project control. They provide a more systematic way of deriving and integrating control mechanisms into the development process. This article briefly describes an approach for holistic project control mechanisms developed as part of the public “Soft-Pit” project making use of reusable, customisable control components, which are instantiated according to different organisational goals and characteristics. Furthermore, it describes practical guidelines for introducing such control mechanisms into an organisation based on our experience gathered in the Soft-Pit project as well as based on expert opinions collected during a workshop on software cockpits. The article concludes with a brief summary and an outlook on future research.
[1]
Silvia T. Acuna,et al.
New Trends in Software Process Modelling
,
2006
.
[2]
Robert Hendrick,et al.
Software Management Environment (SME) concepts and architecture, revision 1
,
1992
.
[3]
Ken-ichi Matsumoto,et al.
Ginger2: An Environment for Computer-Aided Empirical Software Engineering
,
1999,
IEEE Trans. Software Eng..
[4]
Dieter Rombach,et al.
People-oriented capture, display, and use of process information
,
2009
.
[5]
Marvin V. Zelkowitz,et al.
The Web Measurement Environment (WebME): A Tool for Combining and Modeling Distributed Data
,
1997
.
[6]
Jürgen Münch,et al.
Software project control centers: concepts and approaches
,
2004,
J. Syst. Softw..
[7]
Cemal Yilmaz,et al.
Software Metrics
,
2008,
Wiley Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Engineering.
[8]
Douglas C. Schmidt,et al.
Metric-driven analysis and feedback systems for enabling empirically guided software development
,
1991,
[1991 Proceedings] 13th International Conference on Software Engineering.
[9]
Jürgen Münch,et al.
Evaluating Software Project Control Centers in Industrial Environments
,
2007,
ESEM 2007.