Applying process modelling

Abstract

Software process modelling aims to represent the software development process as a coherent set of related steps. It intends to improve our understanding on the wide range of activities required for software development, and on the often complicated interactions between these activities. The major goal of process modelling is to get a better understanding on, to allow reasoning about, and to encourage agreeing upon the software development process. A software process assessment activity uses these improved insights to propose an action plan. Such an action plan is a revised process model. On top of this model, we propose then a software development environment automating parts of the model. This paper describes an effort to define a real life process model for software development in an ESA (European Space Agency) environment. It is part of a program to establish an ESSDE (European Space Software Development Environment) which contains tools supporting the ESA software process model.