STARS process concepts summary

Abstract

The mission of the STARS program is to stimulate and accelerate the transition into practice of productivity-and quaiity-enhancing benefits from emerging software pro ce ss and reuse technologies.Process technology development and transfer activities in STARS are organized to present a conceptual model [see Figure 1] of process insertion, usage, and improvement that will achieve process-driven development in organizations developing criticai software systems. This model addnmes the interactions between major participants in processprocess definers, process users, process improvers, and those responsible for institutionaiizing effective processes. Key constituents of the model (and hence, activities in STARS) are a process asset library, process definition technology, process enactment (use) support, process measurement technology, and process evolution concepts. The SEI'S process concepts provide the context and industry expectations for process technology which STARS is fostering, and the SEI leads the joint STARS/SEI process Asset Library activity.STARS emphasizes automated support for process technology (meaning tools supporting the emerging role of process engineer) in evolving, commercially supported software engineering environments. Because Ada systems development is the primary target of STARS technology, STARS is sponsoring formaiizations of Ada process models and reuse processes that take advantage of Ada. Figure 1. Process-Driven Development Conceptual Model 1

Process library

“…It uses inheritance as a second dimension, in addition to task decomposition, to explore the similarities among different processes. In an similar effort, the Process Asset Library [10], the goal is to organize all assets, e.g. generic process architectures, cycle models, process elements (or subprocesses or steps), of business processes into one easily available online database.…”

“…For example, in the WfM area, workflow processes have been described with various Petri-net, directed graph, formal grammar, etc. based formalisms, among which some representative ones include wOrlds [3], IBM WebSphere MQ Workflow [12], Staffware [25], WFnet [29], FLOWer [30], WASA 2 [33]; in the PSEE area, more than a dozen process languages [1], including SPADE-1 [2], Little-JIL [4], CSPL [5], EPOS [6], E 3 [13], HFSP [14], OIKOS [21], APPL/A [26], have been developed; in the BPR area, representative work includes Process Handbook [20], and Process Access Library [10] for systematic business process modeling and analyzing. These efforts have deepened substantially the understandings of processes and produced many interesting process management mechanisms and systems.…”