Tracking personal processes in group projects

Abstract

IntroductionMeasuring, guiding and refining an organization's software process improves effectiveness of development resources and provides a level of control on software quality. The development of the SEI Capability Maturity Model [24] has raised awareness of the need for better software processes. Software processes are often discussed at the project management level, and its not uncommon for an organization to employ the services of a process engineer with the intent of wide-scale process improvement.Software processes describe the interaction among people and artifacts in carrying out the work involved in the software life-cycle. A software process encompasses the work that will be done (activities), what it will use and produce (input and output products), who will do it (agents), as well as, when and how it will be done (behavior). The past decade has seen increased demand for more powerful and robust automated software process systems. Tool vendors and the research community have responded with a variety of approaches.A review of the tool market place shows many groupware, process and workflow tools whose functionality ranges from graphical modeling or simple enactment to full support for defining, executing, analyzing, measuring, and tracking software processes. The Plethora of tools, most of which have not been widely adopted, combines together with the increasingly distributed nature of software development today to form one of the challenges addressed by this paper. That is, the need to have interoperability among a heterogeneous set of process tools (which execute on distributed heterogeneous platforms.)The efforts of the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) [30] and the Object Management Group (OMG) are aimed at this challenge. Both organizations are identifying common interfaces that vendors can use for interoperability among their products. Other middleware efforts have identified process support services, for example, PCIS (Portable Common Interface Set) [9]. A follow-on project [18] integrates the Open Process Components of Gary [13] with other middleware components, such as version and configuration management. In this paper, we build on these efforts to show how processes can be distributed compositions of personal process components.Considerable research has addressed automating the software process. Some are addressing formalisms for expressing process [3]. Different formalisms such as Petri nets [12], rule-based formalisms [1,25], process programming languages [10], event-based representations [4,8,21], and object-oriented approaches [8,21] are Software engineering continues to develop methods for process improvement and quality. The Personal Software Process is one way to introduce software engineers to aspects of process tracking, assessment and improvement. In this paper, we describe the software tools that we've constructed to support the planning and postmortem of software activities. We describe an approach that allows the personal software process to be used in group projec...