An environment for managing software development processes

Considerable efforts have been undertaken to construct environments supporting dynamic software processes. The road to success neither takes us into the runtime stack of the process engine (rule-based approaches), nor may we tolerate the straight-jacket of a static Petri net. We propose an environment centered around dynamic task nets, which provide project managers with all details required to plan, analyse, and monitor software projects, taking into account changes to the product structure, feedbacks, simultaneous engineering, and replanning of resource assignments. Developers benefit from the management of dynamic work contents, including control over incoming versions of input documents and intermediate releases of output documents. The environment is based on a formal specification as a graph rewriting system, which allows for describing editing, analysis, and enactment of task nets in a uniform formal framework. By generating code from the specification, we avoid the cumbersome and error-prone task of translating complex graph transformations manually into a low-level programming language.