Teaching Information Systems Development via Process Variants

Acquiring the knowledge to assemble an integrated Information System (IS) development process that is tailored to the specific needs of a project has become increasingly important. It is therefore necessary for educators to impart to students this crucial skill. However, Situational Method Engineering (SME) is an inherently complex process that may not be suitable for students to apply in a classroom IS development project. SME is defined as the systematic creation of new methods from parts of existing methods, i.e., the method fragments, by taking into account the specific business situation of each IS development project. A less complex pedagogical approach is to teach students how to design an IS development process variant that incorporates the building blocks of various existing processes in order to leverage the advantages of each individual process. This paper first proposes a framework for teaching students the designing of process variants, followed by a preliminary empirical study conducted in a genuine classroom setting to determine whether the framework benefits students. Through the preliminary study, we discuss how the student IS development project teams had successfully applied our framework to design and use their own process variants. The initial observations obtained from the study also suggest that students who designed their own process variant appeared to consistently outperform those who did not, i.e., students which opted to use the traditional waterfall model

Leveraging CVL to Manage Variability in Software Process Lines

International audienceVariability on project requirements often implies variability on software processes. To manage such variability, Software Process Lines (SPLs) can be used to represent commonality (i.e., common practices) and variability (i.e., differences) of a set of related software processes. To this end, some Software Process Modeling Languages (SPMLs) natively integrate variability mechanisms. Nevertheless, such a coupling between the SPML and the variability mechanisms i) requires to interpret the requirements variability in terms of the processes variability, ii) limits the reuse of the requirements variability for other purposes (e.g., the development itself), and iii) is a barrier to the use of advances from the field of variability management. In this paper, we propose an approach to apply the Common Variability Language (CVL from the OMG consortium) for requirement variability modeling and its binding to the processes. This work is illustrated on a family of industrial Java development processes. Our approach enables the definition of an SPL and the automatic derivation of a process from this SPL according to the requirements of a given project. The variability is managed separately from the process model and benefits from existing tools coming from process modeling community and CVL

Engineering software design processes to guide process execution

Using systematic development processes is an important characteristic of any mature engineering discipline. In current software practice, Software Design Methodologies (SDMs) are intended to be used to help design software more systematically. This paper explicitly shows, however, that one well-known example of such an SDM, Booch Object-Oriented Design (BOOD), as described in the literature is far too vague to provide specific guidance to designers, and is too imprecise and incomplete to be considered as a fully systematic process for specific projects. To provide more effective and appropriate guidance and control in software design processes, we applied the process programming concept to the design process. Given two different sets of plausible process requirements, we elaborated two more detailed and precise design processes that are responsive to these requirements. We have also implemented, experimented with, and evaluated a prototype (called Debus-Booch) that supports the executi..