Improving software development project team performance: a Web-based expert support system for project control

Delivered software is often late and over budget, while offering fewer features than requested by the user. Many software developers have difficulties establishing and adhering to a project plan and in delivering what the user wants within the budget and schedule. Developers also have difficulty in obtaining user involvement in the development process. This paper discusses a Web-enabled expert system, Project Management Advisor (PMA), which will provide alerts and corrective actions for some of the common problems that plague software development projects. PMA was developed as a part of a CyberCollaboratory built to facilitate collaborative project work. The development and evaluation of a collaborative generic expert system for identification and analysis of anomalies in project plan data is expected to be useful to many software development teams and managers in a wide variety of organizations PMA is a field prototype and was evaluated rising 11 real world project plans. The preliminary analysis of the findings is presented and discussed.