Modeling ad-hoc collaboration for automated process support

Abstract

Understanding and supporting collaboration is a major concern in any collective endeavor. In software engineering, planning collaboration is difficult and often occurs rather ad-hoc. However, many proposals for the description and support of collaboration assume necessary information is readily available and already integrated in process models. We believe practitioners should be given the ability to represent their evolving understanding about collaboration and should be supported by tools using such representation. We developed an extension to the Software & System Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM), which introduces concepts needed to represent precise and dynamic ad-hoc collaboration setups. We also describe tool support and present a proof-of-concept based on a fictitious but realistic application example. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.