Integrating planning and execution in software development processes

In conventional approaches to support planning of software development processes, the project plan has to be completely specified ahead of the process enactment. These approaches ignore two main characteristics of software development processes. Firstly, many planning decisions can only be made on base of knowledge resulting from the development process itself. Therefore the project planner must be able to extend and adapt the plan during enactment on basis of the current project data. Secondly, plan changes have to be taken into account. Considering these observations, the planner can be supported effectively, only if planning and enactment steps are alternated. In this contribution we identify the main requirements on a “dynamic” planning of software development processes and present methods and techniques which meet them