Improving Process Portability Through Metrics and Continuous Inspection

Abstract

Runtimes for process-aware applications, i.e., process engines, constantly evolve and in the age of cloud-enabled process execution, the need to change a runtime quickly becomes even more evident. To cope with this fast pace, it is desirable to build processes in a way that makes them easily portable among engines. Reliance on process standards is a step in the right direction, but cannot solely solve all problems. Standards are just specifications from which implementations will naturally deviate, thus fueling the problem of process portability. Here, the field of software measurement can provide some remedy. Metrics for process portability can help to make intelligent decisions on whether to invest in porting or rewriting process-aware applications. What is more, if integrated into the development process through agile techniques like continuous inspection, portability metrics can help in the implementation of more portable processes from the very beginning. In this chapter, we present an approach for the measurement of process portability and explain how this can improve decision making and process quality in general. The approach builds on the recently revised version of the renowned ISO/IEC software quality model and we describe how this model is in line with techniques of continuous inspection. We discuss what constitutes process portability and present a set of newly proposed software metrics for quantifying portability.