NextMove: A Framework for Distributed Task Coordination

This paper presents NextMove, a framework that assists project managers in allocating and managing tasks in an agile, distributed development environment. In such environments, managing tasks dynamically is difficult because of the lack of available informal, lightweight communication mechanisms. The framework simulates the project manager´s thought processes involved in prioritizing and allocating tasks, by aggregating the variables involved in a software project, such as schedules, feature priorities and team-member attributes, using multi-criteria decision-resolution methodologies. We implemented the framework as a distributed client-server application using Java and MySQL. In addition, we built a simulator to evaluate the effectiveness of the framework. Preliminary simulation results show that, when compared with randomized selection of tasks, NextMove is more efficiently allocates tasks, so in a way that the project is completed sooner.