DIMANAGER: A TOOL FOR DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT

Elisa H. Moriya Huzita, Maria Edith Villela Pedras, Gabriel Preti Santiago, Tania F. Calvi Tait

Universidade Estadual de Maringá – Departamento de Informática

Av. Colombo, 5790

87020-900 Maringá - Estado do Paraná - Brasil

Keywords: distributed softw

are, management, tool

Abstract: In a competitive world, is ver

y important that to have tools that offer an adequate support to the project

manager with information about the development process. However at the moment, there is no a complete

environment offering the adequate resources to develop distributed software, integrating both technical

aspects related to software development and the management aspects. So it is very interesting to develop

tools that offer an adequate support to project manager with technical and managerial information. This

paper presents DIMANAGER - a tool to manage the distributed software development, including planning

and monitoring aspects. It is part of the DiSEN environment and offers the adequate technical and

managerial information for the project manager. These information can be used to make decision about how

the resources can be better used and also make decision regarding the actions that need to be taken to obtain

a software with quality.

1 INTRODUCTION

The large dissemination of computer network, the

hardware’s cost reduction and the large diffusion of

Internet have encouraged studies about distributed

systems and also the development of corresponding

software. From now we will use the term distributed

software to refer for one that is executed in an

environment with several nodes that are in

geographically different places. Particularly, the

distributed software requires an efficient

management during their development and it

becomes more interesting if we have tools that offer

the necessary support. These tools should offer

support to define cost estimation, effort for

development and duration estimate of the project

development and also the definition of an adequate

distribution of the tasks among team members. Also

it is necessary plan a viable program to develop the

project activities and a way of controlling them on a

continuous base. However at the moment, there is

no a complete

environment that offers the adequate

resources to develop distributed software,

integrating both technical aspects related to software

development and the managerial aspects. So it is

very interesting to develop tools that offer an

adequate

support to project manager with technical

and management information. This paper presents

DIMANAGER – a Distributed software

development management tool - to support the

software developer to manage the development of

distributed software at the context of DiSEN –

Distributed Software Environment (Pascutti, 2002)

that is an environment in which the MDSODI

Distributed Software Development Methodology

(Huzita, 2001) is part of and is being developed as a

research project. The DIMANAGER

contributes

offering to the project manager very important

information related to the technical and managerial

aspects and thus support adequately the decision

making during the software development. Its

prototype version, its validation, the conclusions and

the future directions for our research are also

presented.

659

H. Moriya Huzita E., Edith Villela Pedras M., Preti Santiago G. and F. Calvi Tait T. (2004).

DIMANAGER: A TOOL FOR DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 659-662

DOI: 10.5220/0002623506590662

 SciTePress

2 THE SOFTWARE PROJECT

MANAGEMENT

The project management aims to guarantee that the

established process is executed, coordinating and

monitoring the software engineering activities.

Generally, the project management is little

approached/practiced and the development teams are

unable to measure the project performance, verify

the failures points and establish improvement.

On the other hand, several difficulties are

inherent to the project management, such as: a) the

process dynamic; b) adaptation for the environment

depending on the existing resources, tools, personal

or team ability; c) the software development is

difficult to control and measured because it is a

creative and intellectual activity; d) several variables

that are involved, such as methodologies, tools,

technologies and others.

There are several tools, such as: ToolManager

(Oliveira, Rouiller and Vasc

oncelos, 2001), tool to

manage the cooperative software development at the

PROSOFT context (Lima, Reis e Nunes, 1998), tool

to support the component development

(Pfaffenseller, Pfaffenseller e Kroth, 2001) among

others.

However they are tools that support only some

aspects during the software development. The

DIMANAGER, presented in this paper, differs of

them because it is part of DiSEN environment. It

will be integrated with others tools that offer support

to the MDSODI. The integration will occur through

a repository (Moro, 2003).

3 DIMANAGER TOOL

The DIMANAGER (Pedras, 2003) was developed

considering concepts related to CASE tools and

relevant aspects for the project such as: planning;

organization of the activities in order to achieve the

established objectives; control; people allocation;

and coordination. Also, some other characteristics

were considered: distributed software; managerial

information and WEB. DIMANAGER considers the

distributed software

characteristics such as:

concurrence/parallelism; communication,

synchronization and distribution, throughout the

process. The architecture is presented disposed in

layers. As DiSEN, is a distributed environment, it

can have many workspaces and tools depending on

what is available in each workspace. As a tool, the

DIMANAGER might be available in one or more of

these workspaces. See figure 01.

Works

ace

DIMANAGE

Figure 1: DIMANAGER representation in DiSEN.

DIMANAGER tool must send and receive

information about the projects that are being

developed in the DiSEN. The information

interchange between DIMANAGER and DiSEN

occurs through the data repository (Moro, 2003).

The relevant data about the project which can be

stored in this repository are: the activity executed in

each phase; the teams and their participants; the

chronogram; the participant’s technical performance

and the problems identified in each activity.

3.1 The DIMANAGER Main

Functionalities

The DIMANAGER functional requisites are:

planning and controlling the project (figure 02).

In the project planning the activities involve:

project and users inclusion. In this

planning is

included the information that will be used to control

the project: phase; activity; chronogram; participant;

function; participation; situation, and problems.

agent

manager

planning

controlling

Application layer (tools)

Reposi

tory

Dynamic

supervisor

Workspace

Manager

Application management layer (distribution/coordination)

Persistence

support

Naming

support

Transactio

support

Platform (Operational Systems, Computer, Network Resources)

Middleware Abstraction Manage

Middleware

object

manager

Agent

support

CORBA JINI RMI

ICEIS 2004 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND SPECIFICATION

660

In the project control are deal information about

the project related to participants and the activities

that are performed.

Figure 2: DIMANAGER domain model.

Other specific aspects are considered by

DIMANAGER tool: identification of the activities

within project, metrics identification, participants,

activities, and chronogram.

Each participant must document the activities

performed and so generating data to project

controlling.

Related to the human resources, the

DIMANAGER tool presents the participants

coordinator and the activities coordinator, along

project manager are responsible for analysing the

project results. Thus, based on data about

participants, activities and metrics, the project

manager can visualize the results related to the

activities performed for each participant, analyse the

performance of each one and verify if project is

developed according the established budget and

time.

3.2 DIMANAGER Tool Presentation

Elements are disposed in DIMANAGER tool in

three main components: presentation; services and

users, as seen on figure 03.

The Presentation component contains a brief

description with concepts, characteristics, structure,

purpose and functionalities that the tool offers. The

Users component, shows to the project manager all

users that work in the project. They are classified as:

manager or participant. Manager has a greater level

of access permission

The Services component, as see on figure 04,

offers to the project manager three functionalities:

project planning; project updating and project

controlling. Relevant information related to:

activities; problems; chronogram; team;

participation can be supplied to DIMANAGER tool.

Figure 3: DIMANAGER components

Activities

They can be specified according to each project

phase: requisite; analysis; project; implementation

and test. Each activity is related with chronogram

and participants. Also, the sequence of activities

must be established as well as the classification of

activities states that can be: in progress, in planning,

stopped, cancelled, and finished.

Problems

Problems are classified in: technical and

organizational. Technical problems involve, for

instance, the communication fault whereas

organizational problems are related to: human

resources; business and strategies; questions related

to outsourcing among others.

Chronogram

This indicator make possible for user to have a

general vision of the situation of the project. Each

activity will be defined according to necessary effort

for its execution (participant/hour); result; initial and

final date and state.

Team

This indicator identifies the teams of the project

as well as its situation. DIMANAGER deals with

teams by their characterization for distributed

software, which are defined by geographic

localization or activity.

4 DIMANAGER VALIDATION

The validation process was defined and performed

aiming at verifying viability and acceptance of

DIMANAGER tool by professional of the area. Two

aspects were approached in the validation process:

(a) managerial aspects indicators and (b)

DIMANAGER tool.

Projec

planning

Projec

controlling

Project

manager

DIMANAGER: A TOOL FOR DISTRIBUTED SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT MANAGEMENT

661

The first one – managerial aspects indicators

(Santiago & Tait, 2003) have been applied and they

were accepted well and considered relevant by

participants of the validation process. However,

some aspects were pointed out as important: show

an indicator for restrictions related to time and costs;

present an automatic control of projects with

message for the manager to know about possible

chronogram delay.

The second aspect – DIMANAGER tool -

evaluated points as: visualization; usefulness of the

project management; applicability and of

development of projects in areas geographically

apart were asked for the participants. Interviewers

considered this tool relevant and pointed out that: it

controls

each project phase and promotes an

adequate project control.

5 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

DIMANAGER tool token into consideration three

important aspects: distributed software management;

organizational and technical aspects and metrics.

This tool is directed to the project management in

the distributed software development.

In the project development data about technical

and organizational aspects are generated by

DIMANAGER for a specific project and it can be

used as part of historic data. DIMANAGER uses

human/hour effort as metric.

From DIMANAGER tool, five elements must be

more considered for the future researches: (1) costs;

(2) data repository interface; (3) version control; (4)

managerial reports and (5) an evaluation of the

DIMANAGER tool in the DiSEN environment as

altogether.

Finally, an important aspect considered in the

development of the DIMANAGER tool was the

approach of management aspects in the distributed

software management. Thus, besides DIMANAGER

tool construction and its integration with DiSEN

environment, this

research brings management

aspects in the distributed software management as

consolidate approach and certainly, can be an area

that will bring many contributions linking

management aspects and distributed software

engineering.

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