The Role of Process In Integrated CASE Environments

Abstract

Early work on CASE environment integration concentrated on the mechanistic aspects of integration between tools. The process context in which those integrated tools would be used was less of a concern. In recent years, however, the process aspect of integration has grown in importance in the eyes of most members of the software community. The role of process, and hence of process integration, is now generally regarded as critical. Such issues as determining the impact of process on the choice of tools to be integrated, how those integrations should be implemented, and how a CASE environment will be used in the overall life of an enterprise are now increasingly seen as being of paramount importance. As an example, while one could assert that a particular analysis tool should be integrated with a documentation tool, this is of little real value. A more meaningful assertion is that the analysis tool must make use of documentation services to generate documentation in some standard life-cycle model form (e.g., DoD-STD-2167 document sets). The three-level model of integration proposed in this book reflects this interest in process. In our three-level model, process integration is orthogonal to mechanism- level integration and service-level integration. In this view, we see that integration is not just an amalgamation of related tools, but is the combination of several integrating mechanisms, used over some set of services (as implemented by tools) to achieve some specific process objective. Put another way, we view software processes as defining a design context, i.e., a set of integration requirements. When implemented, they can be expressed as a coordinated set of environment services, i.e., unified through a combination of control, data, and presentation mechanisms. In this chapter, we explore the broad subject of process integration in more detail. We first consider several divergent views on the nature of process integration itself, and particularly the question of process in the context of “process improvement.” We then examine the relationships between process integration and CASE tools and environments. We next look at some idealized examples of how processes and tools interact, and some issues raised by these examples.