Task Delegation and Coordination in a Distributed Development Environment
Abstract
The objective of the project is to develop a task coordination and allocation method (TCAM) and a task coordination and allocation assistant (TCAA) tool for use in a distributed agile software development environment. The project would build upon existing work in project management, workflow modeling and task delegation. The TCAM would take various factors in a software project, such as team member attributes, stakeholder feedback, and information from process model, to determine the most pertinent actions to be taken. The TCAM would also match the skills and experience of project team members to the roles which perform the activities. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the method, a TCAM-based tool will be built.
Introduction
Over the past few years, agile development methods steadily gain popularity in the world of software development. However, agile development processes may encounter difficulties in task coordination and allocation on large or distributed teams because of agile methods' inherent need for frequent, informal face-to-face communications. The purpose of the project is to develop a task coordination and allocation method (TCAM) and a task coordination and allocation assistant (TCAA) tool for use in a distributed agile team environment.
In a project, organizing tasks and activities is one of the main responsibilities of a project leader or project manager. The project manager needs to determine the tasks that are essential to the achievement of the next milestone (task coordination), and allocate those tasks to team members of different expertise and experience (task allocation). As software development projects are volatile in nature, the project manager needs to revisits those task coordination and allocation decisions frequently in order to account for exceptions, changing requirements and team member feedback. In the task coordination process, the project manager needs to consider milestones (immediate and long-term), state of the artifacts, risks associated with each activity, as well as feedback from team members. Workload, strengths, and area of work of each team members are criteria of consideration in the task allocation process.
Current Status
Relevant Links / Documents
Links: