DPMTool: A Tool for Decisions Management in Distributed Software Projects

From recent decades, the phenomenon of globalization is affecting the business model of companies, evolving into a global market that seeks to reduce costs, increase productivity and competitive advantage. The companies engaged in software development are no strangers to this phenomenon, and also being adapted to develop the software in a distributed way at different development teams scattered around the world. This is known as Global Software Development (GSD). This software development paradigm introduces a number of advantages for companies that follow it, but also introduces a number of difficulties and challenges associated with geographical, temporal and socio-cultural distances. One of the major difficulties appears in the Knowledge and Decisions Management as in GSD information comes from many different sources, which makes its management, storage and reuse very complicated. In order to mitigate some of these challenges, we have developed a tool to support the decisions management made in software projects, in the context of global development. Therefore, the system enables the creation, storage, retrieval and transmission of decisions tackled in a software project, carried out in a delocalized way. In addition, the tool allows project managers manage the information of software projects and the most important value is that it also provides techniques to reuse the decisions taken in previous projects into new projects with similar characteristics.