A service-oriented architecture for software process technology

Abstract

As teams become more distributed and software systems increasingly complex, the difficulty of coordinating development processes becomes significant. Software Process Technology supports the planning and execution of software development processes to be managed and supported by computer programs. This paper describes the development of a decentralised process support and management tool, and explores its functionality for both process modelling and enactment. Our focus is on a highly distributed and service-oriented approach with the intention of providing good distribution of system components and easy integration of third-party tools and remote services for coordination by workflow.

Pounamu: A meta-tool for exploratory domain-specific visual language tool development

“…These evaluations have each been reported in detail elsewhere and include (in order of application development): the IMÅ L distributed process modeling and enactment tool (reported in (Helland, 2004), eight survey participants); a prototype UML tool (reported as a component of (Mehra et al, 2005), 10 survey participants); and the SDL statistical survey specification tool (reported in (Kim et al, 2005), eight survey participants). We summarize these evaluations here as evidence that tools implemented using Pounamu provide good usability characteristics.…”

“…We evaluated both IMÅ L's modelling capabilities and its presentation of enacted process stage information in Pounamu modelling views (Helland, 2004). Users reported they found the visual modelling facilities to be good, the multiple view support helpful, and consistency management between different views and error reporting to be good.…”

“…This is used by statisticians to design, enact and process complex statistical surveys. • A software process modelling and enactment tool IMAL (Helland, 2004) (Fig. 11(d)).…”

“…This exposes Pounamu's model representation, modelling commands, menu extension capability, etc, permitting tight and dynamic integration of third party tools, and other Pounamu environments. We have, for example, used this API to implement peer to peer based synchronous and asynchronous collaboration support between multiple Pounamu environments, to implement generic GIF and SVG web-based thin client interfaces, to implement interfaces for mobile device deployment, and to integrate a Pounamu based process modelling tool with a process enactment engine (Helland, 2004).…”