An approach for defining ways-of-working

摘要

Process modelling is considered today as a key issue by both, the Software Engineering (SE) and the Information Systems Engineering (ISE) community. However, most recent process models are descriptions of software development activities written in an executable form that computer systems can enforce. There is a need for process models which take into account heuristic knowledge to guide humans performing systems development. We refer to such guidance centred process models as ‘ways-of-working’. So far, most work has concentrated on developing and experimenting with process modelling approaches and little attention has been paid to the problem of developing a method for defining a new process model. We propose in this paper, an approach for defining ways-of-working in a systematic manner. It is a meta-modelling approach in which a given way-of-working is constructed by instantiation of a process meta-model allowing to deal with a large variety of situations in a flexible, decision-oriented manner. Based on the properties of the meta-model, ways-of-working are formally defined, with an appropriate level of genericity, and in a modular way to facilitate their evolution and improvement. They are designed for providing automated and flexible guidance in decision making during the process. The paper presents the approach, exemplifies it with the way-of-working defined within the Esprit project F3 and illustrates how the process is guided on an F3 case study.