The MILO S system supports
dynamic coordination of
distributed software
development teams by
integrating project planning
and workflow technologies over
the Internet. The three-tiered
Java architecture enables plan
refinements to be made on the
fly, and a change management
component automatically
creates traceability relationships
between project entities.
O
ne strategy for reducing time-to-market in software development
is to deploy globally dispersed teams in concurrent work. T his
distributed development process requires flexible coordination
and control to channel the work into a single, consistent system release.
Several technologies have been developed to support distributed develop-
ment. With project planning technology, managers can focus on schedul-
ing and resource balancing issues using tools such as Microsoft’s MS Pro-
ject. T hese tools offer limited team support, however, because they cannot
describe information flows. Nor do planning tools usually support coor-
dination and routing of information to team members.
On the other hand, workflow systems and software process enactment
(that is, execution or interpretation) engines are two technologies that do
support process execution. Workflow systems, frequently used to automate
business processes, route information between team members. Such sys-
tems are not readily adapted to the software development domain, howev-
er, because they usually lack planning support or do not support on-the-
fly changes. Software process enactment engines provide more flexibility
and a tighter integration with software engineering tools, but usually require
specialized training in the modeling approach.
Yet another technology is project spaces, which apply Internet tech-
nologies to provide Web server access to project documents such as require-
ments, designs, and source code. Project spaces are passive, which forces
software development teams to obtain information on their own behalf.
The active process support tool we describe in this article is MILOS,
which stands for Minimally Invasive Long-term Organizational Support.
MILOS is being developed as part of an ongoing joint project of the Soft-
ware Process Support Group at the University of Calgary and the Artifi-
cial Intelligence Group at the University of Kaiserslautern. So far, the tool
has been used in case studies for our own development process.
65 I EEE INTERNET COMPUTING 1089-7801/ 00/ $10.00 © 2000 IEEE http:/ / computer.org/ internet/ MAY • JUNE 2000
W O RKFLO W
Merging Project Planning and
Web-Enabled Dynamic
Workflow Technologies
FRA N K M A U RER
University of Calgary
BARBARA DELLEN
Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering
F AW SY BEN DECK, SIGRID G OLDMANN , H A RA LD H O LZ ,
BORIS KÖ TTI N G, AND M ARTIN SCHAAF
University of Kaiserslautern