Software Process Definition Research Articles

Modeling software processes from different domains using SPEM and BPMN notations: An experience report of teaching software processes

In a current application development scenario in different environments, technologies and contexts, such as IoT, Blockchain, Machine Learning and Cloud Computing, there is a need for particular solutions for domain-specific software development processes. The proper definition of software processes requires the understanding for the involved teams and organization’s particularities and specialized technical knowledge in Software Engineering. Although it is an essential part of Software Engineering, many university curricula do not dedicate as much effort to teaching software processes, focusing more on the basic principles of Software Engineering, such as requirements, architecture and programming languages. Another important aspect of software processes is modeling. The modeling of a software process provides a basis for managing, automating and supporting the software process improvement. In this context, teaching software process modeling becomes challenging, mainly due to the great emphasis on theory and few practices. This work presents an experience report teaching the definition and modeling of software processes in different domains. In the discipline of software processes, we applied a practice for defining and modeling processes in various application domains, such as: IoT, cloud, mobile, critical systems, self-adaptive systems, machine learning, blockchain and games. The processes were modeled in the Software Systems Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM) and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) notations based on references from the literature for each domain. We evaluated the process modeling practice with the SPEM and BPMN in two classes of the software processes discipline, and we had discussions about the use of the two notations applied to the different domains. In general, students reported good experiences in defining processes, highlighting the importance of practical modeling applications for professional life. As the main results of the study in teaching process modeling, we have that: (i) students accepted HEFLO tool better than EPF Composer tool; (ii) most students are not aware of specific domains and that anticipating the study of these domains in the discipline is a good strategy; and, (iii) the students also highlighted the need for more support for the two notation tools.

Software process line as an approach to support software process reuse: A systematic literature review

Abstract Context Software Process Line (SPrL) aims at providing a systematic reuse technique to support reuse experiences and knowledge in the definition of software processes for new projects thus contributing to reduce effort and costs and to achieve improvements in quality. Although the research body in SPrL is expanding, it is still an immature area with results offering an overall view scattered with no consensus. Objective The goal of this work is to identify existing approaches for developing, using, managing and visualizing the evolution of SPrLs and to characterize their support, especially during the development of reusable process family artefacts, including an overview of existing SPrL supporting tools in their multiple stages; to analyse variability management and component-based aspects in SPrL; and, finally, to list practical examples and conducted evaluations. This research aims at reaching a broader and more consistent view of the research area and to provide perspectives and gaps for future research. Method We performed a systematic literature review according to well-established guidelines set. We used tools to partially support the process, which relies on a six-member research team. Results We report on 49 primary studies that deal mostly with conceptual or theoretical proposals and the domain engineering stage. Years 2014, 2015, and 2018 yielded the largest number of articles. This can indicate SPrL as a recent research theme and one that attracts ever-increasing interest. Conclusion Although this research area is growing, there is still a lack of practical experiences and approaches for actual applications or project-specific process derivations and decision-making support. The concept of an integrated reuse infrastructure is less discussed and explored; and the development of integrated tools to support all reuse stages is not fully addressed. Other topics for future research are discussed throughout the paper with gaps pointed as opportunities for improvements in the area.

Collaboration optimization in software process composition

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to describe an optimization approach to maximize collaboration in software process composition. The research question is: how to compose a process for a specific software development project context aiming to maximize collaboration among team members? The optimization approach uses heuristic search algorithms to navigate the solution space and look for acceptable solutions.Design/methodology/approach: The process composition approach was evaluated through an experimental study conducted in the context of a large oil company in Brazil. The objective was to evaluate the feasibility of composing processes for three software development projects. We have also compared genetic algorithm (GA) and hill climbing (HC) algorithms driving the optimization with a simple random search (RS) in order to determine which would be more effective in addressing the problem. In addition, human specialist point-of-view was explored to verify if the composed processes were in accordance with his/her expectations regarding size, complexity, diversity, and reasonable sequence of components.Findings: The main findings indicate that GA is more effective (best results regarding the fitness function) than HC and RS in the search of solutions for collaboration optimization in software process composition for large instances. However, all algorithms are competitive for small instances and even brute force can be a feasible alternative in such a context. These SBSE results were complemented by the feedback given by specialist, indicating his satisfaction with the correctness, diversity, adherence to the project context, and support to the project manager during the decision making in process composition.Research limitations: This work was evaluated in the context of a single company and used only three project instances. Due to confidentiality restrictions, the data describing these instances could not be disclosed to be used in other research works. The reduced size of the sample prevents generalization for other types of projects or different contexts.Implications: This research is important for practitioners who are facing challenges to handle diversity in software process definition, since it proposes an approach based on context, reuse and process composition. It also contributes to research on collaboration by presenting a collaboration management solution (COMPOOTIM) that includes both an approach to introduce collaboration in organizations through software processes and a collaboration measurement strategy. From the standpoint of software engineering looking for collaborative solutions in distributed software development, free/open source software, agile, and ecosystems initiatives, the results also indicate how to increase collaboration in software development.Originality/value: This work proposes a systematic strategy to manage collaboration in software development process composition. Moreover, it brings together a mix of computer-oriented and human-oriented studies on the search-based software engineering (SBSE) research area. Finally, this work expands the body of knowledge in SBSE to the field of software process which has not been properly explored by former research.

Activity-Based Software Process Lines Tailoring

Software process definition requires choosing the process elements that appropriately fulfil the tailoring requirements, such as to prevent risks or to satisfy quality goals. The selection of appropriate process elements is usually done manually, making this process complex, time-consuming and error-prone. Our main objective is to define a systematic approach to tailor software process and a support tool to simplify and to support the tailoring process by improving the selection process of reusable process elements. We developed a systematic approach to tailor software process based on software process architectures and lines. This approach selects the process elements that appropriately match the tailoring requirements. A web tool was developed to support the use of the proposed approach. We concluded that the approach aids process engineer to make decisions for selecting a set of process elements suitable to the tailoring requirements and to the project context.

Amalgamation of Personal Software Process in Software Development Practice

Today, concern for quality has become an international movement. Eventhough most industrial organizations have now adopted modern qualityprinciples, the software community has continued to rely on testing as theprincipal quality management method. Different decades have different trends in software engineering. The Personal Software Process (PSP) is anevolutionary series of personal software engineering techniques that an engineer learns and practices. A software process is nothing without theindividual programmer. PSP a data driven process customized to teaching individuals about their programming styles, helping software engineers further develop their skills in developing quality software. Apart from discussing about PSP as a framework of techniques to help engineers and their organizations to improve their performance while simultaneously increasing product quality, in this paper, the Personal Software Process definition, principles, design, advantages and opportunities are explained focusing on the incorporation of PSP concepts in software development practice.

Understanding the characteristics of quality for software engineering processes: A Grounded Theory investigation

ContextSoftware engineering organizations routinely define and implement processes to support, guide and control project execution. An assumption underlying this process-centric approach to business improvement is that the quality of the process will influence the quality, cost and time-to-release of the software produced. A critical question thus arises of what constitutes quality for software engineering processes. ObjectiveTo identify criteria used by experienced practitioners to judge the quality of software engineering processes and to understand how knowledge of these criteria and their relationships may be useful for those undertaking software process improvement activities. MethodInterviews were conducted with 17 experienced software engineering practitioners from a range of geographies, roles and industry sectors. Published reports from 30 software process improvement case-studies were selected from multiple peer-reviewed software journals. A qualitative Grounded Theory-based methodology was employed to systematically analyze the collected data to synthesize a model of quality for software engineering processes. ResultsThe synthesized model suggests that practitioners perceive the overall quality of a software engineering process based on four quality attributes: suitability, usability, manageability and evolvability. Furthermore, these judgments are influenced by key properties related to the semantic content, structure, representation and enactment of that process. The model indicates that these attributes correspond to particular organizational perspectives and that these differing views may explain role-based conflicts in the judgement of process quality. ConclusionConsensus exists amongst practitioners about which characteristics of software engineering process quality most influence project outcomes. The model presented provides a terminological framework that can facilitate precise discussion of software engineering process issues and a set of criteria that can support activities for software process definition, evaluation and improvement. The potential exists for further development of this model to facilitate optimization of process properties to match organizational needs.

Uses and applications of Software & Systems Process Engineering Meta‐Model process models. A systematic mapping study

SUMMARYSoftware process engineering is a discipline, which aims to study and improve software development and maintenance processes. The explicit definition of software processes is essential. To this end, the Object Management Group consortium proposed the Software & Systems Process Engineering Meta‐Model (SPEM) that exploits the benefits of the Model Driven Architecture paradigm applied to software process models, instead of software specification models. The aim of this study is to discover evidence clusters and evidence deserts in the use and application of SPEM from a business process management point of view. To reach the proposed objective, we have undertaken a systematic mapping study of the existing scientific literature.The reviewed literature deals mainly with process modeling and, to a lesser extent, with process adaptability, verification, and validation, enactment and evaluation. Wide agreement exists in using the SPEM meta‐model to develop different types of methods and processes. Further research efforts are needed in areas related to enactment and evaluation of software processes. There is a need to evolve to a new version of the meta‐model that incorporates the improvements proposed by different authors. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software process definition and management

Software process definition and management

MDE‐based process tailoring strategy

SUMMARYDefining organizational software processes is essential for enhancing maturity because they cannot be improved if they are not specified. However, software process definition is hard and still not good for assuring productivity because the best process depends on the project's particularities. The process engineer can define a specific process for each kind of project, but this is expensive, unrepeatable, and error prone. Moreover, it is difficult to foresee all project scenarios and therefore the appropriate processes. The most usual situation is to apply always the same software process, although it is known to be suboptimal. To deal with this challenge, we propose a model‐based approach to software process tailoring that automatically generates project‐specific processes on the basis of the organizational process and project contexts. We still require competent process engineers to define the company's process, but once done, our approach is systematic, repeatable, and easy to use. The proposal is applied for tailoring the requirements engineering process of a medium‐size Chilean company. Processes obtained matched those used in the company for planned project contexts, and they were also reasonable for nonexpected situations. The company's process and project engineers agreed that the approach was highly valuable. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Impact of Personal Software Process on Software Quality

Today, concern for quality has become an international movement. Even though most industrial organizations have now adopted modern quality principles, the software community has continued to rely on testing as the principal quality management method. Different decades have different trends in software engineering. The Personal Software Process (PSP) is an evolutionary series of personal software engineering techniques that an engineer learns and practices. A software process is nothing without the individual programmer. PSP a datadriven process customized to teaching individuals about their programming styles, helping software engineers further develop their skills in developing quality software. In this paper I explain the Personal Software Process definition, principles, design, advantages and opportunities apart from discussing about PSP as a framework of techniques to help engineers and their organizations improve their performance while simultaneously increasing product quality focusing on the incorporation of PSP concepts in software development practice.

The situational factors that affect the software development process: Towards a comprehensive reference framework

ContextAn optimal software development process is regarded as being dependent on the situational characteristics of individual software development settings. Such characteristics include the nature of the application(s) under development, team size, requirements volatility and personnel experience. However, no comprehensive reference framework of the situational factors affecting the software development process is presently available. ObjectiveThe absence of such a comprehensive reference framework of the situational factors affecting the software development process is problematic not just because it inhibits our ability to optimise the software development process, but perhaps more importantly, because it potentially undermines our capacity to ascertain the key constraints and characteristics of a software development setting. MethodTo address this deficiency, we have consolidated a substantial body of related research into an initial reference framework of the situational factors affecting the software development process. To support the data consolidation, we have applied rigorous data coding techniques from Grounded Theory and we believe that the resulting framework represents an important contribution to the software engineering field of knowledge. ResultsThe resulting reference framework of situational factors consists of eight classifications and 44 factors that inform the software process. We believe that the situational factor reference framework presented herein represents a sound initial reference framework for the key situational elements affecting the software process definition. ConclusionIn addition to providing a useful reference listing for the research community and for committees engaged in the development of standards, the reference framework also provides support for practitioners who are challenged with defining and maintaining software development processes. Furthermore, this framework can be used to develop a profile of the situational characteristics of a software development setting, which in turn provides a sound foundation for software development process definition and optimisation.

Software Process Definition: a Reuse-based Approach

Software Process Definition: a Reuse-based Approach

SPEM ontology as the semantic notation for method and process definition in the context of SWEBOK

The Guide to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) provides a consensually validated characterization of the bounds of the software engineering discipline and to provide a topical access to the Body of Knowledge supporting that discipline. The topic ?Notation for Process Definition? references selected notations appropriate for software process definition. However all of them have weakly defined semantics, thus is not possible to use formal techniques for process model creation, validation etc. In this work we present created Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM) Ontology that improves the lack of mentioned process notations. The SPEM Ontology constitutes a semantic notation that provides concepts for knowledge based software process engineering. The work also discusses utilization of such semantic notation in other selected SWEBOK topics, the Software Project Planning, the Software Project Enactment, and the Verification and Validation.

What we learn from the study of ubiquitous processes

AbstractSoftware engineering has come to recognise the value of software processes as vehicles for addressing such goals as improved efficiency in software development, the achievement of improved product quality, and better coordination and communication of the members of software teams. Greater clarity, completeness, and precision in defining these processes seem to lead to greater effectiveness in pursuing these goals. The languages and notations used to support definition of such processes seem to be relatively successful in supporting these definitions, but more progress towards better languages and notations seems indicated. This article suggests that processes are also central to the effective pursuit of essential goals in a broad spectrum of other domains of human endeavour. We suggest that the study of how processes are used in those other domains to pursue goals that are essential in those domains can help us to reflect on our goals for the use of process in software development. Further, we suggest that observing the process language features that seem to facilitate the pursuit of goals in these other domains can similarly suggest features that would seem analogously important in languages used to support the definition of software processes. This article examines the use of processes in domains other than software development and uses observations about these processes to suggest desiderata for software development processes, and the languages used to define them. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

FMESP: Framework for the modeling and evaluation of software processes

Nowadays, organizations face with a very high competitiveness and for this reason they have to continuously improve their processes. Two key aspects to be considered in the software processes management in order to promote their improvement are their effective modeling and evaluation. The integrated management of these key aspects is not a trivial task, the huge number and diversity of elements to take into account makes it complex the management of software processes. To ease and effectively support this management, in this paper we propose FMESP: a framework for the integrated management of the modeling and measurement of software processes. FMESP incorporates the conceptual and technological elements necessary to ease the integrated management of the definition and evaluation of software processes. From the measurement perspective of the framework and in order to provide the support for the software process measurement at model level a set of representative measures have been defined and validated.

Doing quality work

This paper discusses the role of personal software process definition in the education of computing professionals and the importance of emphasizing quality in the development of software. After examining recent government and industry efforts in introducing and instituting effective software development processes, there is a description of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and Watts Humphrey's Personal Software Process (PSP) and its use in industry and academia. The rest of the paper reports on a recent project that introduced PSP concepts into CS1 and CS2. Project methods and activities are described and the results of the project are analyzed. Finally, future enhancements and extensions of the project are discussed.

The capability maturity model: Guidelines for improving the software process

I. THE CAPABILITY MATURITY MODEL FOR SOFTWARE: BACKGROUND, CONCEPTS, STRUCTURES AND USAGE. 1. Introducing Software Process Maturity. The Evolution of the CMM. Immature versus Mature Software Organizations. Fundamental Concepts Underlying Process Maturity. Total Quality Management and the CMM. Customer Satisfaction. Benefits and Risks of Model-Based Improvement. 2. The Software Process Maturity Framework. Behavioral Characterization of the Maturity Levels. Skipping Maturity Levels. Visibility into the Software Process. Prediction of Performance. 3. The Structure of the Capability Maturity Model. Internal Structure of the Maturity Levels . Maturity Levels. Key Process Areas. Key Practices. Common Features. 4. Interpreting the CMM. Interpreting the Key Practices. The Key Process Area Template. Interpreting the Common Features. Organizational Structure and Roles. Understanding Software Process Definition. The Evolution of Processes. Applying Professional Judgment. 5. Using the CMM. A CMM-Based Appraisal Method. Process Assessments and Capability Evaluation. Software Process Improvement. Using the CMM in Context. 6. A High-Maturity Example: Space Shuttle Onboard Software. Introduction. Background. Approaches to Process Improvement. Overall Lessons. II. THE KEY PRACTICES OF THE CAPABILITY MATURITY MODEL FOR SOFTWARE. 7. The Key Areas for Level 2: Repeatable. Requirements Management. Software Project Planning. Software Project Tracking and Oversight. Software Subcontract Management. Software Quality Assurance. Software Configuration Management. 8. The Key Process Areas for Level 3: Defined. Organization Process Focus. Organization Process Definition. Training Program. Integrated Software Management. Software Product Engineering. Intergroup Coordination. Peer Reviews. 9. The Key Process Areas for Level 4: Managed. Quantitative Process Management. Software Quality Management. 10. The Key Process Areas for Level 5:Optimizing. Defect Prevention. Technology Change Management. Process Change Management. Appendix A: References. Appendix B: Acronyms. Appendix C: Glossary. Appendix D: Abridged Version of the Key Practices. Appendix E: Mapping the Key Practices to Goals. Appendix F: Comparing ISO 9001 and the CMM. Appendix G: An Overview of ISO's SPICE Project. Appendix H: Change History of the CMM. Appendix I: Change Request Form. Index. 0201546647T04062001

Setting Up A Pre-production Quality Management Process In The Medical Device Industry

Medical device development and manufacture is a large, regulated industry. Medical devices now include a substantial software component which must be developed according to good manufacturing practices. Good manufacturing practices require the definition and enforcement of software processes which ensure quality products by defining a detailed method of software construction. Although the technical problems of creating a software process are significant, the political and human problems associated with its implementation are of greater difficulty. Our experience with organizing the software process including the transfer of software technology from the defense industry to medical electronics will be discussed.