A distributed tool for commitment specification and management

The need for specifying and managing commitments is supported by many elements in software development, such as project plans tracking systems, and process reviews. Commitment structure in organizations are so large, distributed, and complex that it can be coped with only via appropriate environments and tools. This paper proposes a distributed tool with its notation for commitment specification and management. Distributed Commitment Management Tool (DCMT) enables every single software developer to specify her commitments while modelling her own process in cooperation with others, and to manage her commitments based on the knowledge obtained via this modelling. The findings of the DCMT constitute valuable information not only for detecting and resolving unmet commitments and also for providing basic project management items, such as work breakdown structure, to-do-lists, and expect lists.