Three Perspectives on Process Supporting Environments - Integrating Workflow and Software Process Research

This paper focuses on a special kind of corporate computing systems which we call process supporting environments (PSE). PSEs are CSCW applications guiding or even automating (parts of) business processes. Two different research communities are working on PSEs, namely the software process (SP) community on the one hand and the workflow management (WFM) community on the other hand. Both try to solve similar problems but up to now they worked almost independently of each other. Our intent is to put the work of the two communities into a unifying framework. For this purpose we develop a reference model considering a PSE from three different perspectives. These are the real world view, the functional view, and the infrastructure view describing the real world situations addressed by a PSE, the functions provided and artifacts managed by a PSE, and the techniques used to implement a PSE respectively. We discuss in detail the functional view on a PSE and compare different approaches of the SP and WFM communities. We investigate in which areas one community may benefit from the other. Beyond that, we give hints on further practical applications of our reference model.