Supporting a project leader within an evolving product library
Edward F. Fischer · International Conference on Software Engineering · 2010
One of a project leader's central tasks is to schedule work products and keep track thereof. This is not a trivial issue as software systems are developed neither in a monolithic way, nor correct the first time. Each revision of a single work product may imply the need to check several consistencies with other work products, including various consequences: there might be, i.e., the need to produce new work products, change some specific parts of existing ones, or dismiss them in whole. Practice has shown that project leaders fail to continuely and manually check all dependencies on each single change a project's product library (the set of all documents and versions thereof produced in a project) encounter. Underestimation of remaining workload and late detection of problems with costly resolutions are only two of resulting consequences. This paper identifies a number of typical planning issues, elaborates the underlying problem they have in common, and presents a solution therefore.