Softev: UML-based PSEE environment

Abstract

Software development processes, as a mean to ensure software quality and productivity, have been widely accepted within the software development community. This research introduces how to assist developers to establish quality management plan and monitor the implementation of software processes quantitatively in a CASE environment. A PSEE (process-centered software engineering environment) named Softev has been brought forward to provide developers the environment to define, execute and monitor their processes. As UML is becoming a standard diagrammatic notation for object-oriented modeling and is spreading rapidly, it has been chosen to express the artifacts developed during the requirement analysis and system design stages. In the early products of software process engineering, most research mainly focus on the representations of complex organizational processes and architectures for process-centered application support environment. However, the metrics of software processes and artifacts was not paid sufficient attention to. This research proposes the attributes to be measured during the development period which enable managers to predict and supervise the software project more precisely.