Implementing software project control centers: An architecural view

Setting up effective and efficient mechanisms for controlling software and system development projects is still challenging in industrial practice. On the one hand, necessary prerequisites such as established development processes, understanding of cause-effect relationships on relevant indicators, and sufficient sustainability of measurement programs are often missing. On the other hand, there are more fundamental methodological deficits related to the controlling process itself and to appropriate tool support. Additional activities that would guarantee the usefulness, completeness, and precision of the resulting controlling data are widely missing. This article presents a conceptual architecture for so-called Software Project Control Centers (SPCC) that addresses these challenges. The architecture includes mechanisms for getting sufficiently precise and complete data and supporting the information needs of different stakeholders. In addition, an implementation of this architecture, the so-called Specula Project Support Environment, is sketched, and results from evaluating this implementation in industrial settings are presented.