A CIM Based Approach to Software Project Management

Abstract Despite 27 years of research and education in software engineering, the construction of software systems tends to exceed time and cost estimates considerably. Moreover, software systems still suffer from laxness in requirements analysis, software process management and quality assurance. Many reasons for that problem have been stated as arguments for introducing a new concept, method, model or tool. This paper takes another approach: Starting from the assumption that the reasons are more fundamental, i.e., that the engineering paradigm might not be adequate for all scopes of software development, we propose to adopt well known and proven methods from another discipline, namely industrial production. It will be shown that software development may be seen from a manufacturing point of view and thus may be managed using PPC (production planning and control) concepts. This will lead us to what we will call computer integrated software manufacturing (CISM).