MetaProPOS: A meta-process patterns ontology for software development communities

Abstract

Process patterns are a valuable mechanism to capture and disseminate best practices during any software development process. Consequently, they have been successfully and increasingly used within software development communities to reuse proven solutions. But the multiplicity, diversity and widespread dissemination of their descriptions are making barriers to identify relevant patterns for a specific context. Hence, a more formal and unified representation of process patterns is needed to allow a rigorous reasoning process as well as machine processing means in order to provide architectural and semantic unification of patterns knowledge in addition to an intelligent interconnection of patterns that are most appropriate to solve a given problem. In this context, we propose a semantic representation based on a process pattern meta-model for which an ontology-based approach is adopted. This latter provides a formal and shared conceptualization as well as a robust inferential basis for building an intelligent framework of process patterns capitalization and reuse within software development communities improving therefore, their ability to develop high quality software. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.