Martin Verlage

Directions in Software Process Research

Abstract Developing and maintaining software systems involves a variety of highly interrelated activities. The discipline of software engineering studies processes of both product engineering and process engineering. Product engineering aims at developing software products of high quality at reasonable cost. Process engineering in contrast aims at choosing those product engineering processes appropriate for a given set of project goals and characteristics as well as improving the existing knowledge about those processes. Explicit models of both types of processes help a software development organization to gain competitive advantage. This paper motivates the need for explicit process models, surveys existing languages to model processes, discusses tools to support model usage, and proposes a research agenda for future software process research.

Multi-view modeling of software processes

The objective of software process technology is to support the derivation and analysis of software process models, and their use in projects. Software process models should represent as much as possible of a project, and thereby support as many project members as possible. But a very rare few people ever understand a large project as a whole. The rst problem is that every process element is viewed di erently depending on the contexts of the project members. The second problem is that di erent roles exist within a software project. I believe that a useful software process model can only be derived by describing the process from di erent perspectives. Concentration on a subset of information (e.g., product ow) during modeling is helpful [1]. The part of a software process model which corresponds to a role (i.e., supports the roles tasks) is called a view. Views may overlap and have to be integrated to produce a comprehensive software process model. I believe that development and use of comprehensive software process models should be performed by the application of the following three steps:

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.

Formalizing software engineering standards

A software engineering standard is an aid for systematic software development and process improvement. Because of the informal representation of software engineering knowledge, the document might be inconsistent, ambiguous, and incomplete. A more formal representation promises to overcome these shortcomings. Software process modeling is a direction within software engineering that aims at providing support for capturing software development processes. This paper describes the application of a particular software process modeling approach to three software engineering standards. The lessons learned about the standards, the modeling, and the resulting models are discussed in detail. In addition to the support currently available for both authors and users of standards, future directions of how to use progressive forms of software engineering standards are illustrated. Process modeling technology promises to speed up development, management, and tailoring of software engineering standards.