People-oriented capture, display, and use of process information

Project success demands that process performers have accurate, up-to-date information about the activities they should perform, any constraints upon activity performance, and guidance about how to effectively and efficiently perform their activities. The goal of this chapter is to describe support for people-oriented capture, display, and use of process information that experience has shown is highly beneficial. The chapter reviews several state-of-the-art approaches for supporting people-oriented process performance, illustrates challenges of providing this support, and presents experience from practice. We describe different kinds of process knowledge and discuss a method for collecting one kind of process knowledge - measurement data - in a goal-oriented way. We present different ways to display process information in order to satisfy information needs of people involved in a software development project, including the generation of process documentation, role-based workspaces, and control centers for software development. Furthermore, we illustrate how process information can be used to support process performance through the use of not only workspaces and control centers but also process enactment and experience management. The approaches presented in this chapter can be seen as a contribution towards supporting people-oriented software development.