Coops: A Cooperative Process Planning System to Negotiate Process Change Requests

摘要

In order to lead an ongoing software project to success, it is important to flexibly control its dynamically- changing software process. However, it is generally impossible not only to exactly pre-define the production process but also to prescribe the process change process (meta-process). To solve the problem, we have focused on communication between the project staff through which process change requests presented by indi- viduals can be immediately shared, designed, verified, validated and implemented. This paper proposes a communication model which can represent a wide variety of communication states be- tween the project manager and developers discussing how to im- plement process change requests. The communication model has been derived by investigating the sort of process change requests and, based on the model, we have implemented a cooperative pro- cess planning system (called CooPs). CooPs is a communication environment designed for software projects and supports infor- mation sharing for discussing the process change requests. By using CooPs, the software project can flexibly deal with not only expected change requests but also unexpected ones. To evaluate the applicability of the communication model and the capabil- ities of CooPs, we have conducted an experiment which is an application of CooPs to the ISPW6 example problem. This pa- per describes the concepts of CooPs, the system implementation, and the experiment.