Practical guidelines for introducing software cockpits in industry

Software project control is an essential component for project success. The basis of all control approaches is roughly the same: the collection and effective usage of measurement data to allow for quantitative decision making. But many organizations have problems with establishing project control mechanisms. On the one hand, this has something to do with the complexity of today's software development projects; that is, the number of people involved, the number of distributed development locations, the number and difficulty of functional and non-functional (quality) requirements, as well the experience of the people controlling and steering the project. On the other hand, quantitative project control mechanisms have to be widely accepted within an organization and have to be part of daily life in order to assure high-quality und up-to-date data for project control. This requires the integration of control mechanisms into the development process as well as strategies on how to introduce control-ling mechanisms and provide training in how to use them efficiently. Software cockpits, also known as Software Project Control Centers, support the management and controlling of software and system development projects and provide a single point of project control. They provide a more systematic way of deriving and integrating control mechanisms into the de-velopment process. This article briefly describes an approach for holistic project control mechanisms developed as part of the public "Soft-Pit" project making use of reusable, cus-tomizable control components, which are instantiated according to different organizational goals and characteristics. Furthermore, it describes practical guidelines for introducing such control mechanisms into an organization based on our experience gathered in the Soft-Pit project as well as based on expert opinions collected during a workshop on software cock-pits. The article concludes with a brief summary and an outlook on future research.