Reusable Process Chunks

Reusability of project components, either at the code level or at the conceptual specification level, is considered a fundamental aspect in application development. More recently it as been argued that project histories can support reuse of design decisions. We propose a solution based on so-called process chunks which are generic process frames to resolve the issue stated by a generic requirements engineering (RE) situation. Chunks are classified into micro-chunks and macro-chunks. The latter support the decision making process whereas the former help in implementing the decision. The RE activity based on these chunks consists of (1) recognising a situation as belonging to the class of situations treated by a chunk and (2) the instanciation of the process frame. The benefit expected from this approach is threefold : (1) to speed up the requirements engineering process; (2) to improve the quality of the conceptual specifications; and (3) to offer an extensible way for capturing generic RE process knowledge.