An Axiom Based Metamodel for Software Process Formalisation: An Ontology Approach

Abstract

Software development usually follows well known process models and standards for development processes. However, these are usually diverse and described in natural language which complicates their automation, adaptivity and verification. The need for process formalisation has long been highlighted, and we have provided a formalisation and translation algorithm to that effect in earlier work. However, to systematically and faithfully formalise heterogeneous processes from different standards and process models, there is a need to utilise uniform concepts to underpin the formalisation process. Metamodels and ontologies have been explored recently to lay a foundation for structuring and expressing additional rigour to process formalisation. In this study, we develop an axiom based metamodel utilising powertype patterns as a conceptual framework to underpin homogeneous process formalisation. The advantage of an axiomatic and powertype based metamodel approach lies in its potential to determine the metamodel basic constituents and formalism as well as its extensibility and adaptability. We formalise the metamodel using ontologies while adopting use cases from ISO/IEC 29110 and ISO/IEC 24744 standards for metamodel illustrations. Ontology based process descriptions enable process automated verification and adaptivity capability through the use of ontology reasoning support engines.

Ensuring Conformance to Process Standards Through Formal Verification

“…In this paper, we proposed a formal approach to software process analysis and verification using Description logic based ontology. This paper is a significant extension to our previous works [19,20] by providing a more systematic, consistent and practical approach to translate software processes into DL ontology so that they can be formally reasoned and verified by using ontology reasoners, thereby automating the conformance approach through formal verification. We have represented software process standard requirements as DL axioms argumenting them with other process information in a PRM ontology (DL TBox).…”

“…In earlier studies [19,20], we developed a translation scheme and metamodel for consistent and uniform process formalisation. In the current study, we leverage such a formal process specification for process verification since formal models are basically a set of domain theorems that are amenable to formal proving through reasoning [14].…”

Compliance checking of software processes: A systematic literature review

“…A framework for safety-critical process management in engineering projects 87 Conference S17 Applying process mining techniques in software process appraisals 88 Journal S18 Continuous process compliance using model driven engineering 89 Conference S19 Towards increased efficiency and confidence in process compliance 90 Conference S20 Automated legal compliance checking by security policy analysis 91 Conference S21 A formalization of the ISO/IEC 15504: Enabling automatic inference of capability levels 92 Conference S22 Security analysis and legal compliance checking for the design of privacy-friendly information systems 93 Conference S23 Towards efficiently checking compliance against automotive security and safety standards 94 Workshop S24 An axiom based metamodel for software process formalisation: An ontology approach 95 Journal S25 Enabling compliance checking against safety standards from SPEM 2.0 process models 96 Conference…”

SQuAP-Ont: An ontology of software quality relational factors from financial systems

“…The use of ontologies in the software engineering domain is very common Calero et al (2006); Zhao et al (2009); Kabaale et al (2017). The ISO standards referenced in Section 1 have been the subject of several ontological studies.…”