Analysis of Software Process Specifications

Abstract

A successful software project requires a right blend of technical and managerial activities. A selection of an appropriate software process is indeed one of the most critical issues to a project success. However, since process specifications vary widely in their quality and level of detail, analyzing and understanding them could be very confusing and misleading. This is a big challenge for a systematic study of processes. This thesis proposes a new method for analysis of software process specifications. This is based on three steps: (1) 'elaboration' where all details of a process specification are captured in a uniform notation (2) 'normalization' where the process specification is transformed into a standard terminology and (3) 'abstraction' where the process is graphically presented as a collection of interacting essential activities. The strength of the essential activities and their communication structure are then measured using different measures. The method is applied on six of the popular software process models and the results are analysed. The final analysis reveals interesting shared traits of these software process models; traditional heavyweight process models were found to focus heavily on designing activities while the emphasis of modem lightweight process models is on planning.