MRTC publications
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Reuse, Adaptation and Validation of System Development Processes |
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Abstract Large companies often use a standard system development process tailored for their special needs and that are locally adapted to different development projects. The advantage is that such a standardised project process ensures measurable progress and quality to meet internal requirements as well as external requirements. The local adaptation to projects needs to address aspects of: project size in time and people, distribution of project staff on different locations, combination/integration of hardware/software and incorporation of local experience, standards and regulations. This local adaptation is a highly manual process requiring skill and time and for large companies starting hundreds of new projects every year it is a considerably large part of the yearly development costs. Unfortunately all the gained experience in such local adaptations are difficult to reuse. Today updating the system development process is made manually by staff responsible for the local adaptation and integrate these experience are integrated into the standard process. The recourses for such work are often not sufficient and the result is often local adaptation that have there own life and resul in an out of date standard process where gained experience and local improvements do not spread within the organisation. Recently a number of formalised graphical notations to describe enterprise models have emerged. These formalisations of the processes enables analysis and comparison of processes. We propose a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) approach that enables reuse of processes or parts of processes. The CBR method is proposed as an "add on" to existing process development tools such as the MED@X tool (developed at EDT/UAB) and as addition to Rationals RUP (Rationals Unified Processes) when local adaptations and template processes are needed. By proposing a formal graphical notation in which the user can sketch the local development process the CBR matching process can identify and propose reuse of similar processes that are previous local adaptations. Once a new local adaptation has been completed and successfully used it is automatically added to the case library enabling future reuse. The formalised processes also enable validation of the processes. For example, if the requirements are that certain information (documents) should be produced during the project, an automatic analysis of the overall system development process and the individual work flows can determine if these parts are still included after the local adaptation. In the same manner a check that parts from the standard system development process that are not optional are included in the tailoring process can be made. In this paper we analyse the options and investigate related research, outline the MEDAX-CBR approach and propose a three step implementation sketch. |
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BibTeX entry @techreport{Funk_0269:2000, |
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- Latest update: 2012.08.24