Knowledge acquisition for an integrated project management system

摘要

Management of software projects is a complex task composed of several subtasks. To help the manager to perform these tasks, separate commercial tools are available. As part of the ESPRIT endeavor, a team of industrial and university partners is developing a system that will encompass most of the tasks a manager has to perform. This project, called PIMS (Project Integrated Management System), aims at developing a system to support managers of medium-sized business software projects. What is needed to build such a system is a comprehensive view on management in software projects, emphasizing the integration of the manager's tasks. To gain this insight, a special group within the PIMS project works on knowledge acquisition (KA). On the basis of interviews with expert managers from software houses, an analysis and representation of their experience and knowledge is made. This will be incorporated in the PIMS system. For some aspects of knowledge acquisition we use the KADS (Knowledge Acquisition Documentation and Structuring) methodology, a methodology developed at the University of Amsterdam to extract and formalize expert knowledge to be transferred into knowledge-based systems. In this article, first the PIMS architecture for an integrated software project management support system will be presented. This is followed by a short introduction into the KADS methodology. As results from knowledge acquisition, an overview of project management tasks is given. Subsequently two particular tasks—monitoring and work breakdown—are treated in more detail. Finally, we indicate how these results from knowledge acquisition enhance our understanding of software project management and have an impact on the development of the PIMS system.