a tool for software development driven by customer interaction
Small IT companies contribute significantly to national economy and have special characteristic features such as limited employee and customer base and very few products with single path of evolution. They survive and grow on strong goodwill of their customers, which is due to regular interaction and support provided to them for installation, operation, maintenance, upgradation and training etc. Workflows of these companies are not process centric instead they are customer interaction centric. In this paper, we present a model of interaction driven software development and a tool to support it. The software development process consists of interaction driven short duration iterations focusing on concurrent activities of coding and related support activities. Each iteration is likely to produce an incremental value to customer in the form of additional functional feature of a product, or a bug fixation, or operation support etc. Members of software development team enjoy lots of autonomy regarding decision making based on facts and their beliefs about products, clients, other colleagues and market environment. Our model is based on some of the concepts of agent modeling such as plan, goal, role, belief, action etc. We have implemented a web based tool using Java and XML which provides functionalities to manage interactions, product feature updates, bug fixing and updating beliefs. It also provides limited facilities for project management.
workflow software development process project management interaction management business process