Christer Fernström

Process Weaver: adding process support to UNIX

A description is given of Process Weaver, a set of tools that adds process support capability to UNIX-based environments, including heterogeneous environments with UNIX servers and PC workstations. IT comprises languages and language-based graphical editors for describing processes from three perspectives: a project management perspective, a team-interworking perspective, and the perspective of individual team members. Process descriptions are structured into fragments that are individually enactable. Process enactment assists in managing the flow of information in project teams, provides individuals with task-specific work environments, and automates activities that can be performed without human intervention. Enactment of process descriptions may be achieved under process control, which means that Process Weaver can support process evolution in a controlled manner. Enactment is fully distributed, and takes advantage of underlying tool integration mechanisms for process control of tools.<<ETX>>

Towards a Reference Framework for Process Concepts

This paper discusses the importance of process support for business activities. A reference framework for process concepts and technology support is sought. The general requirements and properties of the process domain are first discussed. Then, four process sub-models are presented to describe activities, products, tools and organisations, respectively. Five process model phases are also introduced, as well as meta-processes and related human roles to handle process models and their transformations. The process concepts are applied to a bank example.

Towards Requirements for Enactment Mechanisms

The issues we have discussed above have a number of implications for the design of formalisms or languages for constructing enactable process definitions, and for the design of process definition enactment mechanisms that would form part of process centered environments. At this stage, it would be premature to regard these implications as requirements, even in an informal sense, but we believe that they can provide a starting point for developing a systematic set of requirements in the near future.

A conceptual framework for evolving software processes

Software processes are complex entities that may last for long periods of time and are carried out through the interaction of humans and computerized tools. They need to continuously evolve in order to cope with different kinds of changes or customizations both in the organization and in the technologies used to support software production activities.In recent years, many software process support technologies have been developed, and have currently been further extended and used in trial projects. Moreover, some research prototypes have generated commercial products, that are marketed and currently used in industrial organizations. Despite these significant efforts and results, however, there is still little conceptual characterization and assessment of the properties of software processes and related support environments. It is difficult to compare and assess existing approaches. Even a common characterization of the problems to be addressed seems to be problematic and difficult to achieve. This is particularly true when we consider the process evolution problem, for which it does not seem that a common view of the issue has been established yet.This paper aims at proposing a conceptual framework to describe and assess flexible and evolving software processes. It is based on the assumption that a software process is composed of two main components: a software production process to carry out software production activities, and a software meta-process to improve and evolve the whole software process.The general requirements and properties of the process domain are first discussed, and the meta-process concept is introduced. Then, we discuss several process related concepts and, in particular, the relationship between the meta-process and the rest of the software process. Methods and technologies needed to support the meta-process are highlighted and discussed. Finally, we apply the resulting framework to an example, in order to show the potential and expected benefits of the proposed approach.

Software factory principles, architecture, and experiments

The software factory concept which symbolizes a desired paradigm shift from labor-intensive software production to a more capital-intensive style in which substantial investments can be made at an acceptable risk level is discussed. Most traditional software environments emphasize support for producing code and associated documents. In a software factory, the focus shifts to coordinating information between producers and consumers so that the right person always has the right information at the right time. A CASE environment architecture and two factory experiments, one a prototype software factory environment for real-time system development, and the other a factory for exploring information logistics, are reviewed.<<ETX>>

OPSIS: a view mechanism for software processes which supports their evolution and reuse

The paper describes Opsis, a view mechanism applied to graph based process modelling languages of type Petri net. A view is a sub model which can be mechanistically constructed from another model by application of a perspective which: identifies all parts of the original model that are contained in the submodel; identifies and transforms all parts that constitute the interface to other sub models; adds new link relations to describe the behaviour of the sub model in interaction with the other sub models. Sub models are more easy to grasp and can be limited in scope to some well defined aspects of a global model, such as the view point ofa single role player. Composition of sub models is achieved through a merge operation on interface elements of sub models. The intended use of Opsis is: 1) process evolution-changes can be localised to certain views, which largely reduces the complexity of applying change; and 2) process reuse-libraries can contain reusable fragments of type view that can be combined using the composition operators.

Tools and environments to improve the software process

Abstract The paper provides a tutorial survey of tools and environments that support the production of software. Depending on their focus, tools and environments may be categorized as supporting programming-in-the-small (focus on support for individuals), programming-in-the-large (focus on product complexity) or programming-in-the-many (focus on team work and coordination). The paper uses these categories as a framework to describe how the various offers available or appearing on the CASE market assist in the production of software. The examples chosen cover a range of products, including: tightly integrated interactive programming tools, syntax-directed editors, tools for software configuration and version management, project databases (repositories), support for reuse, and software factories.

Design considerations for process-driven software environments

PCT No. PCT/DE78/00014 Sec. 371 Date: Apr. 30, 1979 Sec. 102e Date: Apr. 30, 1979 PCT Filed: Jul. 26, 1978 Pub. No. WO79/00114 Pub. Date: Mar. 8, 1979. Valve, in particular for the sanitary engineering field, with two flat and smoothened plates, one on top of the other, held in a housing and movable towards each other as a valve element whereby the plates have one or more through-apertures for one or more media. To simplify installation and reduce costs, the two plates are combined into one pack with appropriate sealing and sliding elements, the pack being bedded in a housing formed from two semi-monocoques having apertures for a valve actuating element and the inlet and outlet lines capable of insertion into an inlet and outlet flow device with pre-tensioning, whereby the contact surfaces of the two semi-monocoques are matched to the individual thickness of the pack by material deformation and are inseparably connected the one with the other.