Formalizing the Software Development Process

Object-oriented software development process, such as the Unified Process [Jacobson 99], Catalysis [D ́Souza 98] and Fusion [Coleman 94] among others, is a set of activities needed to transform user’s requirements into a software system. A software development process typically consists of a set of software development artifacts together with a graph of tasks and activities. Software artifacts are the products resulting from software development, for example, a use case model, a class model or source code. Tasks are small behavioral units that usually results in a software artifact. Examples of tasks are construction of a use case model, construction of a class model and writing code. Activities (or workflows) are units that are larger than a task. Activities generally include several tasks and software artifacts. Examples of activities are requirements, analysis, design and implementation.