Rationale modeling for software process evolution

Abstract

Abstract Evolving a software process without a retrospective on its evolution and, in consequence, without an appropriate understanding, can lead to important problems for a software development organization. Two examples of such problems are inefficient performance as a consequence of the arbitrary introduction of changes or difficulty in demonstrating compliance to a given standard. Capturing information on the rationale underlying process changes provides a means for better understanding process evolution. This article presents two studies aimed at understanding and identifying information needs for describing the rationale for process evolution. Additionally, it presents an approach for incrementally evolving processes supported by this rationale. This approach is derived from the results of the studies and a survey of related work. An application of the approach during the evolution of a reference process for developing service‐oriented applications is presented together with experience and open questions for future research work. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.