A Role-Based Empirical Process Modeling Environment

Abstract

Much contemporary development process research is based on analyses of process steps, their duration, and the events they propagate. Our initial research in large, mature telecommunications development processes concluded that such models do not capture abstractions that remain stable over time. We turned our attention instead to empirical role-based models. The basic abstraction in the model is a "role," a longstanding, stable locus of associated responsibilities in a process. A process model evaluation prototyping environment is used to visualize the process data in several ways, including community-of-interest clustering, communication network clustering, and hierarchical rendering. Analyses of these models have led to powerful insights both into individual projects, and into the properties of software development processes in general