Toward introducing notification technology into distributed project teams

Software development can be thought of as the evolution of abstract requirements into a concrete software system. The evolution, achieved through a successive series of elaborations and refinements, is inherently a complex process. The complexity is not merely in the product - the complexity of managing the evolution of the product throughout the life of a project is proportional to the size and complexity of the product. Managing software project teams is a complex task complicated by the distribution of project teams. Distributed collaboration requires adequate support for team coordination and risk management. Human-computer interaction (HCI) combines technical concerns with human psychological concerns. Similarly, software project managers confront complexities in both of these dimensions. In this paper, we report on a collaborative design environment called LINK-UP being developed to guide the design process and facilitate reuse. We examine some web-based project management tools in terms of their support for collaborative design and virtual team processes. We present a notification system approach to making the design record a natural by-product of the design process and a lever for knowledge reuse. Knowledge from past projects could then be used to automatically notify project teams of potential problems and suggest possible solutions.