Process Technology Appnote

To successfully develop large complex systems requires users to establish and adhere to sophisticated processes throughout the program. With these systems, however, the processes are rarely preserved after system deployment - which means the processes are unavailable to organizations for maintenance and evolution over the system life cycle. Capturing and preserving these processes in a neutral representation that allows them to be re-analyzed and reused offers significant benefit. Several independent process tools are available to help develop and apply these processes on projects; however, appropriate integration and packaging of process technology could provide tremendous benefit to programs.

To support system evolution and upgrades, it is important to make the design processes used in the system available for use or adaptation. Information of particular interest for the upgrade processes includes:

• the design history (key decisions and rationale)
• development logs indicating measures of complexity associated with the original design or previous upgrades
• the rationale/intent information associated with the original process design.

Reusing the original process models in new design environment will improve productivity when users develop the processes to support system upgrades. This is often a complicated task for large systems, which should not have to be reinvented with each incremental system evolution.

These issues are complicated by the cultural issues involved in adopting process based approaches that often tend to diminish functional boundaries and demand decisions that are counter intuitive to a functional mindset.