Requirements and constructors for tailoring software processes: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Organizations developing software-based systems or services often need to tailor process reference models-including product-oriented and project-oriented processes-to meet both their own characteristics and those of their projects. Existing process reference models, however, are often defined in a generic manner. They typically offer only limited mechanisms for adapting processes to the needs of organizational units, project goals, and project environments. This article presents a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed conference and journal articles published between 1990 and 2009. Our aim was both to identify requirements for process-tailoring notation and to analyze those tailoring mechanisms that are currently in existence and that consistently support process tailoring. The results show that the software engineering community has demonstrated an ever-increasing interest in software process tailoring, ranging from the consideration of theoretical proposals regarding how to tailor processes to the scrutiny of practical experiences in organizations. Existing tailoring mechanisms principally permit the modeling of variations of activities, artifacts, or roles by insertion or deletion. Two types of variations have been proposed: the individual modification of process elements and the simultaneous variation of several process elements. Resolving tailoring primarily refers to selecting or deselecting optional elements or to choosing between alternatives. It is sometimes guided by explicitly defined processes and supported by tools or mechanisms from the field of knowledge engineering. The study results show that tailoring notations are not as mature as the industry requires if they are to provide the kind of support for process tailoring that fulfills the requirements identified, i.e., including security policies for the whole process, or carrying out one activity rather than another. A notation must therefore be built, which takes these requirements into consideration in order to permit variant-rich processes representation and use this variability to consistently support process tailoring.

VIVACE: A framework for the systematic evaluation of variability support in process-aware information systems

“…For example, [80] identifies the requirements and mechanisms that consistently support process tailoring. Finally, [93] describes the tools, techniques, approaches, and experiences of variability in software engineering processes.…”

Generation, composition, and verification of families of human-intensive systems

“…Similarly, [2] presents an approach for software process line generation through scoping, by first analyzing existing organizational processes for commonalities and then organizing them within a decision model to allow for future instantiations of customized variants. As a recent literature review [23] notes, most existing approaches have serious limitations because they either only address one aspect of varia-tion (most often what we describe here as functional detail variation), or, when including data-flow and role-based variation these are usually not varied orthogonally to the activity specification. We provide a framework that can address several of these aspects orthogonally, allowing for the composition and nesting of families based on different variation relations.…”

Supporting Tailoring of Complex Product Development Processes: An Approach Based on Structural Modelling and Analysis

“…To contribute to bridging the gap between generic standard reference processes and project-specific instantiations, which arises due to different project objectives and boundary conditions requiring corresponding adaptations of the standard process, the concept of process tailoring has been discussed by a number of authors in literature, with respective approaches being developed (cf. Ginsberg and Quinn, 1995;Martinez-Ruiz et al, 2012;Graviss et al, 2016). Tailoring within the scope of this work is interpreted as the adaptation of organization-specific reference process models to the requirements posed by project boundary conditions via defined and documented guidelines or rules.…”