Integrating Software Lifecycle Models into a uniform Software Engineering Model

Software lifecycle models differ in their artifacts as well as in the dependencies between the included tasks and activities. Therefore support-tools, which support these lifecycles, are typically specialized on a certain lifecycle. A tool for Scrum [5] for example may model user stories and sprints, but exclude risksless shift of the applied software lifecycle, e.g. from a heavyweight to an agile methodology. Furthermore existing tools are mostly isolated from the product model, which complicates traceability between modeling tasks and the objects of tasks, e.g. UML models [3]. This paper proposes a unified Meta-Model to integrate the software lifecycle model into the Rational-based Uniform Software Engineering model (RUSE) [8]. The meta-model aims at two goals, and further evaluation is required to determine to which degree they are satisfied. First the integration between process and product model should enable a complete traceability from tasks to their objects. Second in the meta-model every artifact in the project can be potentially part of the process model, which should allow to seamlessly shift the applied software lifecycle.