An Analytical Review of Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments

Process-centered Software Engineering Environments, or PSEEs, are intended for the definition, modification, and enactment of software process models; they thus bring software development processes into effect. Even though research efforts in process-centered software engineering abound, PSEE technology has not received the attention that it deserves. In order to create a concise but effective and practically applicable evaluation framework for PSEEs, this paper first presents a survey of PSEEs and highlights the current state of the art of the technology. The PSEEs which have been reviewed herein have been regarded as software systems, and as such, have been characterized in terms of their requirements. After providing a conceptual critique of the scope and nature of conventional PSEEs, a detailed criteria-based evaluation of a select set of several recent PSEEs has been conducted. The evaluation criteria have been derived from PSEE requirements and the results of the critique, and have then been refined and evolved into the final criterion set

Supporting Collaborative Development Using Process Models: A Tool Integration-Focused Approach

International audienceCollaboration in software engineering projects is usually intensive and requires adequate support by well-integrated tools. However, process-centered software engineering environ ments (PSEE) have traditionallybeen designed to exploit integration facilities in other tools, while offering themselves little to no such facilities.This is in line with the vision of the PSEE as the central orchestrator of project support tools. We argue that thisview has hindered the widespread adoption of process-based collaboration support tools by incurring too muchadoption and switching costs. We propose a new process-based collaboration support architecture, backed by aprocess metamodel, that can easily be integrated with existing tools. The proposed architecture revolves aroundthe central concepts of ‘deep links’ and ‘hooks’. Our approach is validated by analyzing a collection of open-source projects, and integration utilities based on the implemented process model server have been developed

A User-centric Process Management for System and Software Engineering Projects

In traditional process environments, process modeling is performed by process designers and process enacting is performed by process actors. Due to this separation, there is often a gap between process models and their real enactments. As a consequence, the operational level of process environments has stayed low, especially in system and software industry, because they are not directly relevant to process actors’ needs. In order to facilitate the usage of process environments, this paper presents a solution that enables process actors to perform both the modeling and enacting of their real processes. To this end, first, an end-user process modeling approach was proposed to allow each process actor to easily describe the process fragment containing the activities carried out by his role. Second, an artifact-centric process engine was developed to enact activities coming from different process fragments. Our process engine does not require predefined work-sequence relations among these activities to synchronize them, but deduces such dependencies from their exchanged artifacts. As a result, the process engine can enact even a partially defined process where some fragments are missing

Context-aware Process Management for the Software Engineering Domain

Historically, software development projects are challenged with problems concerning budgets, deadlines and the quality of the produced software. Such problems have various causes like the high number of unplanned activities and the operational dynamics present in this domain. Most activities are knowledge-intensive and require collaboration of various actors. Additionally, the produced software is intangible and therefore difficult to measure. Thus, software producers are often insufficiently aware of the state of their source code, while suitable software quality measures are often applied too late in the project lifecycle, if at all. Software development processes are used by the majority of software companies to ensure the quality and reproducibility of their development endeavors. Typically, these processes are abstractly defined utilizing process models. However, they still need to be interpreted by individuals and be manually executed, resulting in governance and compliance issues. The environment is sufficiently dynamic that unforeseen situations can occur due to various events, leading to potential aberrations and process governance issues. Furthermore, as process models are implemented manually without automation support, they impose additional work for the executing humans. Their advantages often remain hidden as aligning the planned process with reality is cumbersome. In response to these problems, this thesis contributes the Context-aware Process Management (CPM) framework. The latter enables holistic and automated support for software engineering projects and their processes. In particular, it provides concepts for extending process management technology to support software engineering process models in their entirety. Furthermore, CPM contributes an approach to integrate the enactment of the process models better with the real-world process by introducing a set of contextual extensions. Various events occurring in the course of the projects can be utilized to improve process support and activities outside the realm of the process models can be covered. That way, the continuously growing divide between the plan and reality that often occurs in software engineering projects can be avoided. Finally, the CPM framework comprises facilities to better connect the software engineering process with other important aspects and areas of software engineering projects. This includes automated process-oriented support for software quality management or software engineering knowledge management. The CPM framework has been validated by a prototypical implementation, various sophisticated scenarios, and its practical application at two software companies