Barbara Dellen

Merging project planning and Web enabled dynamic workflow technologies

The MILOS system supports dynamic coordination of distributed software development teams by integrating project planning and workflow technologies over the Internet. The three-tiered Java architecture enables plan refinements to be made on the fly, and a change management component automatically creates traceability relationships between project entities.

Knowledge-based techniques to increase the flexibility of workflow management

Abstract This paper describes how knowledge-based techniques can be used to overcome problems of workflow management in engineering applications. Using explicit process and product models as a basis for a workflow interpreter allows us to alternate planning and execution steps, resulting in an increased flexibility of project coordination and enactment. To gain the full advantages of this flexibility, change processes have to be supported by the system. These require an improved traceability of decisions and have to be based on dependency management and change notification mechanisms. Our methods and techniques are illustrated by two applications: Urban land-use planning and software process modeling.

Integrating software process models and design rationales

We describe an approach which allows us to acquire, represent and manage fine-grained causal dependencies between products. These dependencies are basically derived automatically from a software process model. By representing causal dependencies and their rationales, the traceability of the software development processes is improved. Our dependency-based system is able to support users in reacting to changes. Thereby, the costs of software development can be reduced. Based on the theoretical work, the CoMo-Kit System was implemented consisting of a modeling component and a process engine. The use of the system is illustrated.

Enriching Software Process Support by Knowledge-Based Techniques

Representations of activities dealing with the development or maintenance of software are called software process models. Process models allow for communication, reasoning, guidance, improvement, and automation. Two approaches for building, instantiating, and managing processes, namely CoMo-Kit and MVP-E, are combined to build a more powerful one. CoMo-Kit is based on AI/KE technology; it was developed for supporting complex design processes and is not specialized to software development processes. MVP-E is a process-sensitive software engineering environment for modeling and analyzing software development processes, and guides software developers. Additionally, it provides services to establish and run measurement programmes in software organizations. Because both approaches were developed completely independently major integration efforts are to be made to combine their both advantages. This paper concentrates on the resulting language concepts and their operationalization necessary for building automated process support.

Internet based software process support

The paper presents a process oriented view on knowledge management in software development. We describe requirements on process support systems for globally distributed software development projects, introduce the process modeling language MILOS, and an enactment environment based on it.

Wissensbasierte Techniken zur Flexibilisierung von Workflowsystemen

Dieses Papier stellt einen Ansatz vor, in dem Flexibilitatsdefizite beim Einsatz herkommlicher Workflowmanagementsysteme in Softwareprozessen gelost werden. Zum einen werden unter Verwendung expliziter Prozes- und Produktmodelle Planungs- und Ausfuhrungsschritte verzahnt. Zum anderen konnen Plane von Workflows wahrend der Abwicklung geandert, die Effekte der Anderungen berechnet und betroffene Personen benachrichtigt werden. Als Grundlage dienen dabei Mechanismen zur Verwaltung von Abhangigkeiten zwischen Entscheidungen, Prozessen und Produkten.