Software Development as a Workflow Process

It is a general consensus that automated support for software development is essential to harness the ever increasing complexity of today’s software. Many software development models, tools, and environments have been introduced to address such a need; however, they are usually methodology-specific and impose a rather authoritarian policy on the way software is developed. This paper advocates the use of workflow systems to enact the process of software development. Besides being more general and flexible, the workflow paradigm supports useful features lacking in other approaches. Also, it helps to reduce development complexity by allowing both the software development process and the software themselves to be captured using the very same paradigm. This paper introduces a workflow system being developed to support the software development process by presenting a solution to the ISPW6 Software Process Example expressed in its specification language. This paper therefore serves two purposes: (1) to introduce a new and more general approach to software process enactment, and (2) to identify new requirements for the workflow paradigm, such as event dependency, that are applicable to many other advanced applications. Copyright 1997 IEEE. Published in the Proceedings of Joint 1997 Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC’97) and International Computer Science Conference (ICSC’97), December 2-5, 1997 in Hong Kong SAR, China. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works, must be obtained from the IEEE. Contact: Manager, Copyrights and Permissions / IEEE Service Center / 445 Hoes Lane / P.O. Box 1331 / Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, USA. Telephone: + Intl. 908-562-3966. ySupported by a Marie Curie Fellowship from the European Commission (ERBFMBICT960653).