An Algebraic Approach for Managing Inconsistencies in Software Processes

摘要

To produce quality software and evolve them in an economic and timely fashion, enactable software process models are used for regulating development activities with the support of Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments (PCSEEs). However, due to the dynamically changing development environment, the developers do not always follow the process model in presence of unforeseen situations. As human with creativity and variant nature, each developer has his or her own way of doing development that may not be allowed by the process model. As a result, various inconsistencies arise in software processes and then the authority of the process model will be undermined. In this paper, we propose an algebraic approach to promote the efficient management of inconsistencies. With the approach, potential inconsistencies can be precisely detected and valuable diagnostic information is available to help process designers efficiently locate the detected inconsistencies. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated by experimenting it on an example process.