Support for Software Federations: the PIE1 Platform

Research about software processes modelling and support, even during the last decade, has suffered from a lack of practical credibility. Most of the solutions proposed have not gained wide acceptance by the software industry and, moreover, some fundamental issues like evolution have not yet found any reasonable solution. For these reasons, it was a clear decision in the PIE project to build a platform providing the requisite features for evolution support, and also addressing many of the aspects that have so far impeded wide acceptance of process support. Therefore, a major objective of the PIE platform is to facilitate the implementation, in a company, of a complete process support system. This includes the tools, systems and techniques that process participants (developers, managers) are familiar with, as well as PIE specific components. The tools that process participants are used to are likely to be Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS). The motivation to build such a Process Support System (PSS) endeavors to interoperate a number of components, including COTS systems, such that they collectively perform an expected service. We call this set of components a federation. We define a federation as an application built mainly from COTS tools, which implies that they are (mainly) autonomous, and they are not modifiable. The Apel2 foundation is a federation manager, specialized in process support. The goal of the PIE federation (as well as most federations) is not only to provide collectively a (complex) service, but also to preserve the independence and autonomy of its components, to be open to dynamic change in composition and distribution