Process Technologies Method and Tool Report. Volume 1,

Abstract

Abstract : In this era of increasingly complex software and mushrooming software development and maintenance costs, the software engineering community needs to improve its practices to remain competitive and to produce software that can meet complex software requirements. Projects often overrun costs, miss deadlines, and fail to meet the requirements of the customer. Now new software process technologies are evolving to help address these concerns in the areas of process assessment, definition, simulation, and enactment. A software process is a set of activities, methods, practices, and transformations that people use to develop and maintain software and associated products. The quality of a product stems, in large part, from the quality of the process used to create it. To consistently improve products, the process used for developing them should be understood, defined, measured, and progressively improved. Software process assessment is the act of determining the maturity of an organization's software process. Software process definition is the act of specifying in some detail an organization's software process. Software process simulation is the act of executing a software process definition. The term modeling will often be used in this report to encompass both process definition and simulation. The term enactment denotes the use of a formal process definition to guide and control the software process. In this report, software process technologies will be described, their benefits outlined, and their implications assessed. Technology maturity will be discussed and recommendations will be given for technologies that can be effectively used today.