Comparative Experiences with Electronic Process Guide Generator Tools

The primary objective of all software engineering courses is to help students learn how to develop successful software systems with good software engineering practices. Various tools and guidelines are used to assist students to gain the knowledge as much as possible. USC’s Center for Systems and Software Engineering (CSSE) has found that the keystone course in learning software engineering is a year-long real-client team project course. Over the last ten years, CSSE has evolved a set of guidelines for the course, and has experimented with early tests for creating electronic process guides for MBASE (Model-Based (Systems) Architecting and Software Engineering) Guidelines using Spearmint/EPG. Currently, CSSE has been developing and experimenting with Eclipse Process Framework’s (EPF) to situate the LeanMBASE Guidelines. This paper reports our comparative experiences of using the earlier and current tools to generate the electronic process guidelines. In our analysis, we used the objectives defined by Humphrey and Kellner[17] to compare the process tools. The evaluation identifies some research challenges and areas for future research work.