A SURVEY AND ANALYSIS OF PROCESS MODELING LANGUAGES

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2005

In the context of Model Driven Development, models play a central role. Since models can nowadays be executed, they are used not only for description but also for production [32][30][24]. In the field of software process modelling, the current version of the OMG SPEM standard (ver1.1) has not yet reached the level required for the specification of executable models. The purpose of SPEM1.1 was limited at providing process descriptions to be read by humans and to be supported by tools, but not to be executed. Therefore, the OMG issued a new RFP in order to improve SPEM1.1 [35]. Since we intend to participate in the next major revision of SPEM, namely SPEM2.0, in this work, we: 1) compare SPEM1.1 both with primary process model elements (i.e. Activity, Product, Role,…) and with basic requirements that any Process Modelling Language should support (i.e. expressiveness, understandability, executability,…); 2) identify its major limitations and advantages and 3) propose a new UML2.0-based metamodel for software process modelling named: UML4SPM. It extends a subset of UML2.0 concepts-with no impact on the standard-in order to fit software process modelling.

In the last two decades, software process modeling has been an area of interest within both academia and industry. Software process modeling aims at defining and representing software processes in the form of models. A software process model represents the medium that allows better understanding, management and control of the software process. Software process meta-modeling rather, provides standard metamodels which enable the defining of customized software process models for a specific project in hand by instantiation. Several software process modeling/meta-modeling languages have been introduced to formalize software process models. Nonetheless, none of them has managed to introduce a compatible yet precise language to include all necessary concepts and information for software process modeling. This paper presents Software Process Meta-Modeling and Notation (SP2MN); a meta-modeling language that provides simple and expressive graphical notations for the aim of software process modeling. SP2MN has been evaluated based upon the well-known ISPW-6 process example, a standard benchmark problem for software process modeling. SP2MN has proved that it presents a valid and expressive software process modeling language.

2002

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process.

1992

Despite the growing literature on this topic almost no independent critical analysis or evaluation has been available. This paper attempts to fill that gap. In particular we will be reflecting on experience with the Marvel environment from Columbia University. Marvel is the paradigm case of the software process modelling approach to building software development environments. In this paper we examine Marvel's strengths and limitations and look in detail at a small example of its use.

… 6081, National Institute of Standards and …, 1997

Roundtable was to assemble key champions and stakeholders of various approaches towards process representation in order to discuss the relative merits to reach consensus on a language architecture and to establish a technical approach for proceeding. It was agreed that the language architecture should be based upon a formal semantic foundation, upon which would be layered a number of syntactic mappings, each with one or more presentations. In discussions about principal concepts of any process representation ...

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 2009

Several methods for enterprise systems analysis rely on flow-oriented representations of business operations, otherwise known as business process models. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing such models. BPMN models facilitate communication between domain experts and analysts and provide input to software development projects. Meanwhile, there is an emergence of methods for enterprise software development that rely on detailed process definitions that are executed by process engines. These process definitions refine their counterpart BPMN models by introducing data manipulation, application binding, and other implementation details. The de facto standard for defining executable processes is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Accordingly, a standards-based method for developing process-oriented systems is to start with BPMN models and to translate these models into BPEL definitions for subsequent refinement. However, instrumenting thi...

1996

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to "behave" in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 1994

The basic idea behind a Process-Centered Software Engineering Envkonment (PSEE) is that, in addition to storing information about the products produced and used in a software life cycle, it is also important to explicate and store information regarding the process by which those work products are produced and used-indeed, these processes are at the heart of the system. The information about such processes can be used to: (1) tailor the environment to the needs of different processes, (2) provide automation support for appropriate aspects of the process, (3) provide guidance in terms of the ordering of software activities, and (4) help in continuous process improvement.

Universidad de los Andes, 2007

This paper presents the use of Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) technologies to tackle the complexity associated to the definition and improvement of software process models. This complexity arises because these tasks involve the description of different activities as well as the relationships with other processes. In this work, we propose the use of viewpoint models to represent, in a modular and non-intrusive way, concerns expressed on a software process model. We developed a Domain-Specific Aspect Language, called AspectViewpoint, to create viewpoint models using a vocabulary based on the workflow control patterns.

2000

This document describes Version 1.0 of the Process Specification Language (PSL). PSL is an interchange format designed to help exchange process information automatically among a wide variety of manufacturing applications such as process modeling, process planning, scheduling, simulation, workflow, project management, and business process re-engineering tools. These tools would interoperate by translating between their native format and PSL. Then, any system would be able to automatically exchange process information with any other system via PSL.

IEEE Computer Society, 1996

Software engineering environments have a history of about two decades. Early environments provided support for small fragments of the software process (usually focusing on programming-in-the small). Then there was a trend towards support for more complete software processes (from early phases like requirements analysis and design down to testing and configuration management). Ten years ago the notion of process-centered software engineering environments initiated a new field in software engineering: software process research. The key idea is to use a model of a software process as input parameter for a software engineering environment. The environment is supposed to "behave" in accordance to the process model. Some aspects of this vision became true, others turned out to be of little practicability. In this article, we discuss the history of software engineering environments with a particular focus on process-centered software engineering environments (PCSEEs). We discuss the notion of distributed software processes (as one of the most substantial current trends in software process research) and we motivate the notion of a software process middleware which serves as basis of real-world software processes spread over various sites. In addition, we discuss some other trends in the software process research arena.

2014

The article discusses issues related with process modeling. Process modeling is supposed to help to describe, analyze and document processes within the discussed organization. Processes can be modeled with use various tools, some as simple as a sheet of paper and a pen, some sophisticated as specialized notations. It is crucial that the selected method (language) of modeling is understandable to all people participating in the process. Currently, there are over 70 modeling languages in use. The choice of a modeling language depends on peculiarity of a process as well as the determined objective. The present work provides a list of the most commonly used languages and a description of some of them (e.g. BPMN notation, SwimLane method, UML).

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2006

The increasing interest in process engineering and application integration has resulted in the appearance of various new process modelling languages. Understanding and comparing such languages has therefore become a major problem in information systems research and development. We suggest a framework to solve this problem involving several instruments: a general process meta-model with a table, an analysis of the event concept, and a classification of concepts according to the interrogative pronouns: what, how, why, ...

1998

The goal of the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL) project is to investigate and arrive at a neutral, unifying representation of process information to enable sharing of process data among manufacturing engineering and business applications. This paper focuses on the second phase of the project, the analysis of existing process representations to determine how well existing process representation methodologies support the requirements for specifying processes found in Phase One. This analysis will provide an ...