Using megamodeling to improve industrial adoption of complex MDE solutions

Abstract

Companies formalize their software processes as a way of organizing their development projects. As each project has its own requirements and objectives, a family of processes is required in practice, in order to ensure that each project is handled appropriately. This family may be a collection of predefined processes, but can also be automatically generated by tailoring a general process to a project's context which requires formalization and tool support to be successful. Model-driven engineering provides a formal framework for defining the models and transformations required for automated process tailoring, but various types of models must be specified and evolved, limiting the industrial adoption of this approach. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a megamodel for automated process tailoring. Megamodeling provides an integrating framework for modeling in the large, including the definition and evolution of all models and transformations required for tailoring while hiding complexity. We report the application of our approach to the software development process of Rhiscom, a small Chilean company.

The v‐algorithm for discovering software process lines

“…The set of all possible processes followed by a company, that is, process variants, defines a software family. Companies can maintain a predefined process family, picking the variant that best applies to the project at hand; however, this approach has co‐evolution problems . A software process line (SPrL) is defined as a base process along with its variable elements and a systematic mechanism to produce a process variant for each project (tailoring) .…”