ISTAR Evaluation

ISTAR is a software development and project management environment that integrates management and technical development activities. It is based on the contract model, whose primary objective is that every individual in the organization know what is expected of him or her. To accomplish this, the relationships among the individuals of the organization are modeled as contracts. Each contract has a specification of the work to be performed under it, a person to whom it has been assigned, and a person for whom the work is being done. Chapter 2 describes the contract model both as a project management structure and as a data storage structure. It was found that the emphasis on project hygiene leads to a strict separation of user data spaces which causes excess data storage requirements and data movement operations. This, in turn, may make data sharing and cooperative work more difficult. ISTARs user interface is also described in Chapter 2. That interface has a high degree of consistency because all user interaction is mediated through imperial Softwares proprietary editor, E, which is window- and menu-oriented. Chapter 3, which forms the bulk of the report, deals with the functional areas that is, those tool sets supplied with ISTAR which were of most interest to us. The remaining tool sets are described in Chapter 4.