A COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE REUSE OF

PROCESS ASSETS

Fuensanta Medina-Domínguez, Javier Saldaña-Ramos, Arturo Mora-Soto

Ana Sanz-Esteban and Maria-Isabel Sanchez-Segura

Computer Science Department, Carlos III Technical University of Madrid

Avda. Universidad, 30, Leganes 28911, Madrid, Spain

Keywords: Software Process Improvement, Process Assets, Product Pattern, Patterns, Knowledge Management, Reuse,

Software Engineering.

Abstract: In order to allow software organizations to reuse their know-how, the authors have defined product patterns

artefact. This know-how can be used in combination with software engineering best practices to improve the

quality and productivity of their software projects, as well as reduce projects cost. This paper describes the

structure of the Process Assets Library (PAL), and the framework developed to encapsulate the know-how

in organizations. The PIBOK-PB (Process improvement based on knowledge - pattern based) tool uses the

proposed PAL to access the knowledge encapsulated in the product patterns, and to execute software

projects more efficiently. This paper also describes PIBOK-PB’s features and compares similar tools in the

market.

1 INTRODUCTION

In spite of the fact that the use of software process

best practices in a software project development

improves productivity in organizations, projects

planning and the quality of the software products

(Withers, 2000), very few organizations implement

these best practices (Richard, 2003) (Soumitra

Dutta, 1999). Currently, software process best

practices are not deployed because of the little

usability of project management tools. They present

several constraints to represent, manage and transfer

the knowledge of these best practices and the

knowledge obtained through the software

engineering experts’ experience.

Knowledge management is defined as “the set of

systematic and disciplined actions that an

organization can take to obtain the greatest value

from the knowledge available to it” (Marwick,

2001). Knowledge management is based on four

elements (Hey, 2004): data is the minimum unit of

information not elaborated; information is a set of

inter-related data to acquire sense; knowledge is

defined as expertise, and skills acquired by a person

through experience or education; innovation is the

successful exploitation of new ideas. There are two

kinds of knowledge: explicit and tacit. Explicit

knowledge can be codified into documents and

databases and shared among stakeholders relatively

easily. Tacit knowledge is the know-how of

organizations, the capabilities and experiences of

their stakeholders.

This knowledge is difficult to formalize,

communicate and share among the people involved

in the project in the organization.

Figure 1: One view of the DIKW hierarchy. (Clark, 2004).

283

Medina-Domínguez F., Saldaña-Ramos J., Mora-Soto A., Sanz-Esteban A. and Sanchez-Segura M. (2008).

A COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE REUSE OF PROCESS ASSETS.

In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Software and Data Technologies - PL/DPS/KE, pages 283-289

DOI: 10.5220/0001867702830289

 SciTePress

This tacit knowledge is essential to achieve the

innovation stage so that the organization will gain

the competitive advantage.

Software engineers look for knowledge sources,

for example books, on-line resources, databases, to

develop a software process but, on many occasions,

this knowledge is the tacit knowledge of the

organizations (Assimakopoulos, 2006). The study

carried out by (Komi-Sirviö et al, 2002) revealed

that the knowledge is not easy to find and, when it is

discovered, it cannot be reused. The reasons are that

knowledge gathering is too informal and the

knowledge is not readily available to the

organizations. Consequently, it is necessary to

gather the know-how of the organizations in an

artefact to be retrieved and reused in subsequent

projects. We defined an artefact, called product

patterns (Amescua et al, 2006) (Medina-Dominguez,

2007), to gather the knowledge of the software

engineering experts to produce a software product.

In this paper we describe the collaborative

framework that supports software process

improvement based on process assets reuse. The

main capabilities of this framework are:

- to reuse and manage of process assets

- to improve the efficiency of use of the

processes

- to reduce costs in software process

improvement programs

- to work collaboratively in the phases of

software projects

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:

section 2 compares the proposed framework with

similar ones in the market. Section 3 explains the

collaboration framework proposed for process assets

reuse in the project under development. And, finally,

in section 4 we present the conclusions and future

works.

2 RELATED WORKS

The purpose of this paper is to propose the most

accurate architecture for the collaborative

framework. So, the authors reviewed some tools

available in the market as well as some research

prototypes to find out the most critical gaps in the

software tools that software engineers use to manage

software process improvement programs and

projects execution.

We reviewed four software tools and three

research prototypes. The authors analysed, and

evaluated the selected tools based on sixteen features

rated: 0 (Not present), 1 (Partially present), 2

(Present). The features evaluated were inspired by

the work presented by (Dargan, 2001) and are

presented together with the results in

http://sel.inf.uc3m.es/projects/PIBOK-PB/

AnalysisRelatedWorks.pdf. In the reminder of this

section we describe the main results of the

evaluation.

2.1 Support Software Tools

The software tools analysed are presented, mainly

focusing on the following features: knowledge

management, know-how reuse, project management,

software process models deployment support,

collaborative development platform and knowledge

searching.

• CodeBeamer (Intland Software, 2007): is a

collaborative development platform based on

J2EE that offers application life cycle

management features for development teams. It

includes the following main capabilities:

knowledge management (through a mechanism

called wiki asset linking), project management

and information retrieval. This tool lacks

knowledge management formalism because

wikis are considered content management

systems (Cunningham, 2001) instead of a

formal knowledge management artefact. This

explains why knowledge reuse cannot not be

done automatically. Despite the fact that this

tool is intended to support software

development, it does not provide either a

mechanism to select a software process model

for the organization and project features or an

electronic process guide to perform project

activities.

• IRIS Process Author (Osellus, 2007): is a visual

process management system that enables

collaborative authoring and tailoring of process

assets. This tool focuses on process

management and, for project management,

offers the possibility of exporting process

content and configuration to third party tools

such as Microsoft Project. Although this

application also includes some knowledge

management features, it lacks knowledge reuse

for the organization and projects context and

constraints. For know-how representation it

uses templates and wikis instead of a formal

representation artefact such as patterns,

ontologies or a thesaurus. Another deficiency is

the lack of software process models

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management, project planning and project

tracking.

• Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)

(Microsoft Corporation. 2007): is an integrated

Application Life-Cycle Management (ALM)

solution comprising tools, processes, and

guidance to help everyone on a development

team to improve their skills and work more and

more effectively together. As mentioned in

(Medina-Dominguez, 2007), VSTS presents

some deficiencies. Therefore, we decided to

develop a collaborative framework to cover the

deficiencies related to knowledge management,

knowledge reuse and project management.

• Select Solution Factory (Select Business

Solutions, 2006) this tool connects component

based development and solution assembly. It

allows organizations to manage complex

software development projects as well as to

implement code and software components

reuse. Although this application is intended to

ease software development and deployment,

knowledge management features are absent in

reuse. This tool offers support for some

modelling methods such as SSADM and

Yourdon but lacks software process models

management support.

2.2 Research Prototypes

This section presents some prototypes, developed

through research works, which were analysed

according to the following features: knowledge

management, know-how reuse, project management,

software process models deployment support,

collaborative development platform and knowledge

tracking.

• BORE (Henninger, 2003) is a prototype tool

designed to further explore and refine the

requirements for tools supporting experience-

based approaches. This tool is aimed at reusing

organizational experience by packaging it in

experience repositories. Although this tool

offers a huge functionality for knowledge

management, its main flaw is project

management. In spite of presenting tasks

definitions for team members roles, it lacks

vision of the project as a whole.

• OnSSPKR (He, 2007): is a knowledge

management based tool for supporting software

process improvement. It is aimed at composing

and organizing useful process assets into a

knowledge repository based on ontology. It also

supports software process knowledge storage

for retrieval. This tool offers neither project

management execution functionalities nor

software process models management. It does

not support a clear collaborative framework in

spite having of web portals implemented.

• ProKnowHow (Silveira Borges et al, 2002): is a

knowledge management based tool for

supporting software process improvement. It

contains formal and informal knowledge in the

software process database of an organization. It

uses two ontologies to ground the structure of

the organization’s memory. This tools offers

project management and some search

capabilities for accessing past process plans and

lessons learned. It lacks practical representation

for knowledge reuse. Neither active electronic

software process guide nor a collaborative

environment for project execution and

management is offered.

3 COLLABORATIVE

FRAMEWORK DEFINITION

PIBOK-PB is a collaborative framework to support

software process improvement and is based on

process assets reuse. With this tool the authors tried

to fill all the gaps identified in the tools selected and

explained in Section 2.

The PIBOK-PB architecture is shown in Figure 2.

The following sections describe the PIBOK-PB

framework in more detail.

Figure 2: PIBOK-PB Architecture.

3.1 PIBOK-PB Main Features

The main functionalities of the PIBOK-PB tool were

described in (Medina-Dominguez, 2007). The most

relevant are: 1) the reuse of process assets supported

by product patterns artefacts (Amescua et al, 2006)

(Medina-Dominguez, 2007); 2) knowledge

A COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE

REUSE OF PROCESS ASSETS

285

management capabilities; and 3) software process

models selection for the organization and project

features.

The collaboration layer was improved in the

PIBOK-PB tool by developing a collaborative

framework to fill the gaps in knowledge

management, knowledge reuse and project

management. The authors believe that this

collaborative framework will facilitate the use of

PIBOK-PB in organizations, and collaboration

among those organizations that decide to share

knowledge and information.

3.2 Knowledge Managements

Components

The collaborative framework is made up of three

knowledge management components as follows.

Software Process Model Manager. This

component provides several software process

models for each project under development. The

project manager decides which model best fits the

information provided by this component for the

organization and project features. In addition, the

project manager can create a specific model process.

The Software Process Model Manager offers a set of

methodologies or activities to construct different

processes such as software analysis, software design,

software management, software development and

software deployment processes. In this way the

organizations can customize their own software

processes, creating a specific software process

model.

Product Pattern Manager. This component

provides the knowledge that a stakeholder needs to

perform each process model activity. In order to

achieve this task, the system looks for the product

pattern that best fits each activity. In this search, the

component takes into account the context, project

and constraints of the organization, and the problem

to be solved. The rule used to select the accurate

pattern is:

If you find yourself in this context

(and) with this problem

(and) entailing these forces

then

map a product pattern in your project

(and) look for more product patterns

All product patterns that best fit the input

variables are shown to the project manager. One of

the most important fields of product patterns is the

solution. This field provides the steps to carry out

this activity and obtain a specific software product.

The project manager has to select and instantiate a

product pattern for each activity based on his/her

experience.

Current Project Manager. This component

provides the execution plan for the current software

project through an active electronic process guide

and an electronic execution project guide. The active

electronic process guide provides an overview of the

software process model with the following elements:

a software project planning, the tasks of each team

member role and a workflow representing the

processes of the project. The electronic execution

project guide provides: 1) the product patterns

showing the steps to obtain the defined software

product; 2) templates where stakeholders can

capture the information on the current project; 3)

lessons learned by experts engineers; and 4) relevant

information on each activity.

3.3 PIBOK-PB Process Assets Library

Description

A process asset has no value if it is not easily

accessible. The process assets have to be organized,

well-indexed and easily accessible to stakeholders

who need process guidance information. These

characteristics are provided by a Process Assets

Library (PAL).

The PIBOK-PB Process Assets Library is a

collaborative knowledge base and a central

repository that is made up of three repositories:

Process Model Repository. this repository stores

the software process best practices, including

software process models

, methodologies

and

techniques applied to software processes. The

knowledge stored contains the activities and tasks of

these software process best practices, roles of each

activity and relevant information of each., This

repository also contains a set of heuristics based on

rules which, for a set of features of an organization

and a set of project features to be developed,

provides the process model, methodology and

techniques that best fit these features.

Capability Maturity Model Integration –CMMI- (CMMI,

2001), ISO/IEC 15504, also known as SPICE -Software

Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination- (ISO/IEC

15504, 2005), etc.

Unified Software Development Process –UP- (Jacobson, 1999),

extreme Programming –XP- (Beck, 2002), Personal Software

Process –PSP- (Humphrey, 2005), Team Software Process –

TSP- (Humphrey, 2005), (Humphrey, 2006), Scrum

Development Process, etc.

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Figure 3: Process Model Repository.

Product Patterns Repository. this repository stores

the knowledge of software engineering experts in

order to obtain a specific software product and the

know-how of the organization. All this knowledge

provides stakeholders with the information needed

to create, develop and deploy new and better

processes so that the organization achieves the

innovation stage of knowledge management

. This repository explains how a specific role can

perform a specific activity.

Figure 4: Product Patterns Repository.

Project Repository. this repository stores software

projects that have already been developed as well as

those under development. It contains three types of

information related to:

- the process model chosen for this project:

process model, activities, roles, workflow;

- the product patterns of each process model

activity which provide enough information

to perform each activity, and the active

electronic process guide where this

information is shown to the stakeholders;

- the execution and development of each

activity where the information stored is:

project planning, products obtained from

each activity and project tracking.

Figure 5: Project Repository.

3.4 PIBOK-PB Collaborative Support

The organizations need to share knowledge among

stakeholders to enable them to develop the project

activities, taking advantage of the knowledge of past

projects and the experience and knowledge of the

software engineering experts. In this way,

stakeholders can perform their daily tasks and make

decisions using the maximum information available.

So, organizations have to commit themselves to

providing the mechanisms and technologies to allow

collaboration among stakeholders, coordinating

activities and sharing knowledge to develop

software project processes without increasing the

time and cost of projects. In order to disseminate this

knowledge, the framework is supported by a

collaborative platform.

The collaborative platform proposed by the

authors is based on the Microsoft Office SharePoint

Portal Server (MOSS) because of the following

capabilities:

- Better communication among different

software projects roles.

- Coordination of the activities among teamwork

members who need synchronous and/or

asynchronous interaction regardless of their

geographical location.

- Integration among different systems in the

organization.

- Extension mechanisms through application

programming interfaces.

- The most advanced search engine with many

superior characteristics over its competitors

A COLLABORATIVE FRAMEWORK TO SUPPORT SOFTWARE PROCESS IMPROVEMENT BASED ON THE

REUSE OF PROCESS ASSETS

287

such as meta data management or automatic

language detection.

- A familiar and user-friendly interface.

Two screenshots of the collaborative framework

prototype developed are shown below. This

prototype is available at http://

sel.inf.uc3m.es/demos/synergy

Figure 6: Project Manager’s Dashboard View.

Figure 7: Project Management and Tracking Interface.

4 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

TRENDS

In this paper, we have described a collaborative

framework to support software process improvement

based on the reuse of process assets. The framework,

called PIBOK-PB, is made up of tree knowledge

management components, a process assets library

and a collaborative platform. Its main goal is the

transfer and reuse of knowledge among the

stakeholders involved in a software project

development. The knowledge stored in the PAL

contains the experience of software engineering

experts, the know-how of the organization and the

products obtained during the execution of any

software project, usually stored as non structured

assets.

The key benefits and potential use of our work

include:

• Selection and customization of the software

process best practices that best fit the needs of

the organization’s features.

• Reuse of the know-how of the organization and

the knowledge of the software engineering

experts through product patterns artefacts.

• Enough information to know, at each stage of

the software process development, what each

stakeholder has to do and the steps to take

through an Active Electronic Process Guide.

• Knowledge sharing and working collaboratively

through the collaborative platform.

• Feedback mechanisms so that new product

patterns can be created and, in this way,

promote the innovation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been partially funded by the Spanish

Ministry of Science and Technology through the

TIC2004-7083 project.

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