Software development processes can be represented as objects because they and the elements that compose them have attributes and operations, can be linked by relationships and have behavior and states. Therefore, this paper proposes a way to represent processes and their elements as objects. This proposal can be used to represent process models benefiting from the object orientation properties and to define tools to automate processes.
Software development processes are distinct and not standardized because software users have distinct interests and software companies differ in culture, business and technical procedures, and quality parameters. This scenario exposes the need to define process models to be used as standard but that can be tailored according to project and software company characteristics. In the proposal of this paper, a set of process models defined based on object orientation is proposed as a solution to this problem. The set of these models is grouped in views and is named process architecture. Induction by analogy with software architecture was used as a method to conceive and to structure the process architecture.
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