Guided support for collaborative modeling, enactment and simulation of software development processes

Abstract

Recently, the awareness of the importance of distributed software development has been growing in the software engineering community. Economic constraints, more and more outsourcing of development activities, and the increasing geographical distribution of companies come along with challenges of how to organize distributed development. In this article, we reason that a common process understanding is mandatory for successful distributed development. Integrated process planning, guidance and enactment are seen as enabling technologies for achieving a unique process view. We present an overview of the software process modeling environment SPEARMINT and the XCHIPS system for web-based process support. SPEARMINT offers extensive capabilities for multi-view modeling and analysis of software development processes. XCHIPS provides capabilities for distributed modeling and offers enactment and simulation functionalities. This article describes the integration of both approaches. The resulting environment provides planners and developers with collaborative planning and enactment support and advanced process guidance via electronic process guides (EPGs). Additionally, experience with the integrated environment is described. We describe, in particular, the usage of this integrated environment in the context of a case study for the development of a learning system. Finally, an overview of related work is given and future research directions are sketched.