A Megamodel for Process Tailoring and Evolution

Companies formalize their software processes as a way of organizing their development projects. In practice, a family of processes is required, in order to ensure that each project is handled appropriately. This family may be a collection of predefined processes, but can also be generated by tailoring a general process to a project’s context. Automated process tailoring yields the most appropriate process for a project, but requires formalization and tool support to be successful – the general process, its potential variability and tailoring transformations must be formalized up-front, and the context characterizing the project must be specified. MDE provides a formal framework for defining the models and transformations required for automated process tailoring, but as various types of models must be specified, evolution of process families thus defined is hard to manage in practice, limiting the industrial adoption of this approach. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a Megamodel for automated process tailoring. Megamodeling provides an integrating framework for modeling in the large, and as such, enables a controlled evolution of a process family. We report the application of our approach to the software development process of a small Chilean company, showing how different types of evolution are handled in an integrated manner.