Towards dynamic generation of knowledge-based environments for software process assistance

Software process is the most important part of software project management, and software process models are important means of implementing the software process in any software organization. When there is need to improve the software process, then the need to improve the work-task part (software process models) of the software process must arise. As, there is need of increasing the commitment of software project managers through out the software development life cycle (SDLC), so we need to give them the list of activities in Waterfall Model, which should be made efficient by the software development team, to get the 80% productivity (output) easily, by reducing the effort of software development and ultimately increasing the performance of the software process. So, the idea of 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle, 1935) can be applied in the software engineering process model, in this regard. The Pareto Principle (1935) directed us to focus on what is really important in any field and field's work. Software process is most important part of software project management (SPM). This is also then ultimately needed for software project management (SPM) improvement. Our main research work is to improve the work-task part of the software process (i.e. software process models by applying the Pareto Principle - 80/20 Rule (1935) (or law of vital few) (1935), in the software engineering process models (or work-task part of the software process). This will be to facilitate the software project manager, using the software process models practically more efficient than without application of 80/20 Rule in software engineering Waterfall model. This has resulted in the reduction of the software development effort and increase in the performance of the software process. The results (efficient and improved software process models) will be implemented in the software industry, by software project managers, by focusing on the list of activities giving 80 percent of the overall productivity of the software process. The results will be the list of activities having the capability to give 20 percent of the overall productivity of the software Waterfall process, to be ignored, eliminated or designated to reduce the effort.

Experience with software process simulation and modeling

work of W. Edwards Deming has convinced industry that must first measure quality and then emphasise process to improve quality. In response to Deming's arguments and in light of perception that software industry is unable to produce quality products on schedule, and within budget, more software development organisations are now emphasising process measurement, monitoring, and assessment. This paper describes what is meant by software process and discusses an approach for its measurement and improvement. INTRODUCTION Unreliable software makes big news, from emergency services disasters to social security payment blunders. Improved software quality is essential to ensure reliable products and services, and gain customer satisfaction. While software development has existed for more than four decades, we failed so far to make as an industry and as an engineering discipline rather than craft. Developing reliable and usable software that is delivered on and within budget still represents difficult endeavour for many organisations. As role of software becomes increasingly critical for businesses as well as for human lives, problems caused by software products that are late, over budget, or that do not work, become magnified. If lives are lost or people inconvenienced due to incapable computer software, news media is there to make big stories. Organisations are realising that their fundamental problems is immaturity of their software process. Robert Lai (1993) proposes that process improvement is second maturity wave of software industry. He states that the first wave of software was developed using waterfall model in 1970's. Today we are Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 216 Software Management in midst of second wave maturity movement as we attempt to formally define development process and best ways to continuously improve it (Lai 1993). Taking lead in this area has been Watts Humphrey (Humphrey 1989, 1990, 1991), and Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University. SEI started in 1986 to develop process maturity framework to help organisations appraise maturity of their software process, and to provide guidance for organisations to improve their software process capability. A brief description of framework was released in September 1987, including maturity questionnaire. SEI evolved model and questionnaire into 5 -Level Capability Maturity Model (CMM) in 1991. In February 1993, released CMM version 1.1 (Paulk et al 1993). This paper discusses software process and describes capability maturity model (CMM). It also shows how CMM can be used as basis to measure maturity of software process of an organisation and plan its improvement. SOFTWARE QUALITY AND PROCESS IMPROVEMENT In his book Quality is Free Phil Crosby states that: Quality is free. It is not gift, is free. What cost money are unqualify of things all actions that involve not doing jobs right first time (Crosby 1980). If such statement is true for many disciplines, is particularly true for evidence is abundant in number of software products which exceeded their budget, were produced late, failed to satisfy user requirements, and are full of bugs. demand for improved software quality is increasing to ensure reliable products and services. benefits of improved quality comes in form of reduction in failure costs. For software projects failure costs include (DTI 1992): • costs of correcting defects, both before and after delivery • overruns against and budget • unnecessary high maintenance costs • indirect costs which users incur due to poor quality software link between process maturity and software quality is expressed in premise that The quality of software system is governed by quality of process used to develop and maintain it. One stumbling block to improving software quality seems to be that not enough attention is paid to overall development process itself. While software professionals typically devote their to developing, testing or documenting software products, no one has prime responsibility for improving software process. Experience has shown that if Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 Managing Systems 217 no one is working on software process, orderly improvement is unlikely. process certainly won't improve itself, rather, most likely, will deteriorate over time. Continuous improvement can occur only if process infrastructure is in place. Watts Humphrey argues in an early article published in Datamation, April 1989 that: Without work on process, there will be little or no progress in improving software. THE SOFTWARE PROCESS Adopting process view of software development represents revolutionary change in perspective. A process orientation to software development involves elements of structure, focus, measurement, ownership, skills, and supporting technology. In this section we investigate what is meant by software process. What Is Software Process According to Webster's dictionary, process is a system of operations in producing something .. series of actions, changes, or functions that achieve an end result. Chambers Concise Dictionary defines process as a series of actions or events .. sequence of operations or changes undergone. IEEE defines process as a sequence of steps performed for given purpose. In general business context, process is defined as a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce specified output for particular customer or market (Davenport 1993). These definitions put strong emphasis on HOW work is done, in contrast to product focus's emphasis on WHAT. Accordingly, process can be considered as a specific ordering of work activities across and place, with beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: structure for action. In this paper we will adopt following definitions quoted in (Humphrey 1990, Paulk et al 1993) are intended to encompass software throughout its life, which covers new development, enhancement, and repair. software process is The set of activities, methods, and practices used in production and evolution of software. software engineering process is The total set of software engineering activities needed to transform user's requirements into software. Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517 218 Software Management People and Software Process Software development is still people-intensive activity. Talented people are most important element in any software organisation. Even if you get best people available, if they do not follow common process, if everyone wrote in different programming languages, used different conventions, or didn't co-ordinate their design and code changes with their peers, results will be chaos. Successful software organisations have learned that even best professionals need structured and disciplined environment in which to do cooperative work. Software organisations that do not establish such disciplines condemn their people to endless hours of repetitively solving technically trivial problems. obvious fact is that attracting best people is vital, but is also essential to support them with an effectively managed software process. Technology and Software Process Another myth is widespread belief that some technologically advanced tool or method will provide magic answer to software crisis. This is not only wrong, but is dangerous. Organisations which jumped on bandwagon of CASE tools, and ended up in failure and wasted and effort have learned their lesson hard way. Just ask yourself before introducing technology: What do I want to automate? In absence of defined, practised, and managed process, introducing automation can lead to increased chaos. There are several factors which limit effective use of software technology: an illdefined process, inconsistent process implementation, and poor process management. Software technology cannot be fully effective until these problems have been properly addressed. Need for Defined Process If no effort is made to define and enhance software development process across whole organisation, each software development project latches on to its own tools, methods, and practices with little guidance available on how to use them. This ad hoc approach will not be sufficient to tackle task of developing complex software systems. goal of software process management is to enable organisations to produce software that meets cost, schedules, and quality objectives. principles are same that underpins statistical process control-principles that have been successfully used in controlling scientific experiments and in high -volume manufacturing operations. Statistical concepts have been found to be just as applicable to software development as they are to production of manufactured goods such as motor cars. Applying such concepts will only be possible if there is defined and managed process. Software Process Models Transactions on Information and Communications Technologies vol 8, © 1994 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISSN 1743-3517

Welcome to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) held in Zurich, Switzerland, on June 2nd and 3rd, 2012. Having grown from a Software Process Workshop in 2005 to the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) in 2007, and finally to the International Conference on Software and Systems Process (ICSSP) in 2011, this conference series has established its place in the software engineering community as a respected conference focusing on research and practice related to software and systems development process. Software and software systems development use processes as one major means for achieving and ensuring the quality of the final product. This leads to specific challenges regarding software processes such as simplicity, adaptability, standard conformance, the coordination of multiple domains and lifecycles, etc. Processes from other domains (e.g., health care, manufacturing, business, aerospace, automotive systems, and others) face similar challenges. Yet, they share interesting similarities with and differences to software processes. The question is: How can we in the software domain learn from other domains to meet our software process engineering challenges? The ICSSP conferences hence connect the traditional software and systems process community with outside views and insights, broadening its scope of software development processes to system development and explicitly including processes of other domains such as health care, business, and manufacturing. By sharing process development theories and practices from such domains, ICSSP 2012 is investigating novel solutions to today's process challenges. Correspondingly, the main theme of ICSSP 2012 is Beyond Software and Software Systems Processes, signaling our goal of learning from domains other than the traditional software process community.

Recently, the software engineering community has focused its attention on the process of software creation and evolution as well as the products of that process. Much of this attention has concentrated on modeling the software process. Software process models are seen as important vehicles for understanding and reasoning about software creation and evolution activities. Software process models may also provide a basis for structuring automated software environments. Despite this attention and the advantages to be gained through the use of software process models, however, no wholly satisfactory model of the software process has yet emerged.This paper presents an approach to software process modeling which is based on behavioral descriptions of software development activities. The use of behavioral descriptions makes it possible to describe the software process at any desired level of abstraction and, therefore, assists in accommodating aspects of the process which are poorly understood. This approach also provides the ability to reason about the software process and is sufficiently rigorous to provide a basis for structuring automated software environments. An overview of the model is presented, followed by a formal definition. Examples are given to illustrate the application of the model to existing software processes and software methods. Finally, the implications of the model for automated software environments are discussed.

In this chapter, an overview of the research progress both in software processes and software evolution are presented from the viewpoints of methodologies, technologies, tools and management. Firstly, the basic concepts related to software processes are discussed. In addition, an overview of the research progress in the areas of software process modelling and descriptions, software process modelling languages and description languages, software process improvement, CMM, software process reuse and process-centred software engineering environments is presented. Furthermore, the basic concepts related to software evolution are discussed. Finally, the work in the areas of software evolution and software reengineering is also discussed. The research outlined in this chapter shows that both software evolution and software process have become the hot spots in software engineering. The combination of software evolution and software process will promote smooth and effective software evolution.

PSEE (Process-centered Software Engineering Environment) can manage and monitor software process. Software process modeling language is a core element in PSEE system. Due to the particularity and the complexity, software process model includes multi-views: activity view, product view and role view, which should be considered in modeling software process. Based on the similarity between multi-view software process modeling and object Petri nets, this paper proposes the MOPN-SP-net model which is a multi-view software process model based on multi-object Petri nets. The model includes twolevel models: system net and object net. A multi-view paradigm including activity views and product views is provided. Activity views are described by system nets and product views are described by object nets. MOPN-SP-net includes multi-views of software process model, which is characterized with clearer hierarchy, simpler structure, and more extendibility.

In the last two decades, software process modeling has been an area of interest within both academia and industry. Software process modeling aims at defining and representing software processes in the form of models. A software process model represents the medium that allows better understanding, management and control of the software process. Software process metamodeling rather, provides standard metamodels which enable the defining of customized software process models for a specific project in hand by instantiation. Several software process modeling/meta-modeling languages have been introduced to formalize software process models. Nonetheless, none of them has managed to introduce a compatible yet precise language to include all necessary concepts and information for software process modeling. This paper presents Software Process Meta-Modeling and Notation (SP2MN); a meta-modeling language that provides simple and expressive graphical notations for the aim of software process modeling. SP2MN has been evaluated based upon the well-known ISPW-6 process example, a standard benchmark problem for software process modeling. SP2MN has proved that it presents a valid and expressive software process modeling language.

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to “behave” in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.

A software process model describes a set of partially-ordered sequences of activities that are carried out in order to accomplish certain goals. While numerous process modeling approaches have been proposed over the years, it seems that none of them have yet addressed the full range of concepts described in this definition. Most focus on activities and activity ordering; few, if any, focus on representing organizational goals and process improvement. Most provide concrete implementation approaches; few, if any, describe the general model(s) upon which these implementations are built. This paper suggests a new approach for developing software process modeling systems. If “Software Processes are Software Too,” as suggested by Osterweil (1987), then so are software process models, and hence there may be processes and models that are used in regular software development that may be useful in the process modeling domain as well. The paper focuses on the domain class model as an example of one type of model that might be produced if an approach such as the Unified Process were used in the process modeling domain. Such a process, and the set of models produced by it, if used, may be helpful in moving the process modeling field forward. While identifying the conceptual needs of process modeling systems, these models leave totally open the choice of how to formalize and implement actual solutions. A domain class model for process models is developed as an example of one of these models.

A software process is a set of activities that will be carried out over time to produce a software system. Research on the software process has been increasingly recognized. This position advocates the representation of a software development process which should be explicitly defined, maintained and executed by a PSEE (Process Sensitive Software Engineering Environment). The complexity and scope of large scale process models makes their design, development and maintenance very complex. The overall objective of our approach is to define a tool to support the software process model construction and maintenance in PSEE. We investigate how software configuration management techniques applied to the software process can provide a novel solution for the definition and composition of reusable software process components. We present the current status of our work.

Software process play an important role in improving the quality of software products. Formal software process model is conducive to the accurate description of software processes. A software process meta-model is a formal tool used to define software process models. In this paper, a software process meta-model SPMM is designed. Firstly, five important properties in software processes are discussed. Furthermore, based on CSP and Hoare Logic, the definition of SPMM and the rules to build software process models are proposed. In SPMM, not only are the important components, e.g. tasks, activities and software processes in software processes, formally defined, but also the five important properties of software process are embodied. Therefore, SPMM can model software processes at different abstract levels. Thus, the basis to simulate, control, analyze, measure and improve software processes is established.

The International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP), continuing the success of Software Process Workshop (SPW), the Software Process Modeling and Simulation Workshop (ProSim) and the International Conference on Software Process (ICSP) conference series, has become the established premier event in the field of software and systems engineering processes. It provides a leading forum for the exchange of research outcomes and industrial best-practices in process development from software and systems disciplines. ICSSP 2018 was held in Gothenburg, Sweden, 26-27 May 2018, co-located with the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The theme of ICSSP 2018 was studying \Demands on Processes, Processes on Demand" by recognizing the demands on processes that include the need for both welldeveloped plans and incremental deliveries (agile and hybrid processes), utilization of increased automation (model-based engineering and DevOps), higher degrees of customer collaboration, comprehensive analysis of existing products for reuse (open source and COTS), and performance requirements of enterprise-level architectures. Papers presented at ICSSP discussed these issues across different domains, providing concepts, evidence, and experiences.

Software engineers have always been experimenting with various models in an endeavor to improve upon software processes. Recently, a new area of software process improvement through experience management has got attention of the software engineering community. Software developers are experimenting with experience management to improve software process. This chapter explores the role of experience management in mitigating the effects of software crisis and investigates the current state of EM in Indian software engineering environment. The chapter discusses the need and integration of knowledge and experience management practices in software engineering environments. The chapter begins with the discussion of the ills of software engineering, classically referred to as “software crisis,” like late delivery of the systems, ill-functionality, and cost overruns, and justifies how managing the knowledge and experience of software engineers and practitioners can ward off these evils. The chapter then discusses the models and methodologies for knowledge and experience management in software engineering. Finally, the chapter sheds light on the major works carried out in this area and suggests possible future research avenues in this domain.

SUMMARYSoftware process improvement (SPI) can be seen as a profession having its own competence needs and its own community of interest. European projects EQN and EU Cert have defined skill sets and a common certification scheme for about 20 professions, mainly in the IT domain. European Certification and Qualification Association ECQA is created to manage certification and provide the necessary infrastructure. A common way to approach the IT domain from a process perspective is the ‘3S’ concept (Software, Systems, Services). Software process can be seen as the first spearhead among these. The first software process models, such as CMM and SPICE, have already existed for about 20 years. With all the experience that the models bring, it is reasonable to start the PI profession from the software process. Software Process Improvement Manager (SPI Manager) is one of the new topics in ECQA. The development of the SPI Manager training and certification scheme has been done in many small steps so far. This paper explains the current structure and the main components of SPI Manager competences, training needs and the certification scheme. Several other schemes will be developed in the future for process improvement‐related competences. The current version of the SPI Manager skill set is mainly based on software, systems and service processes and their related reference models. It could also be used in the future in domains other than IT. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.