MVP-L Language Report

Intellectual control over software development projects requires the existence of an integrated set of explicit models of the products to be developed, the processes used to develop them, and the productivity and quality aspects involved. Processes especially are still based mostly on implicit models. In recent years the development of languages, methods and tools for modeling software processes, analyzing and enacting them has become a major emphasis of software engineering research. The majority of current process research projects concentrate on the prescriptive modeling of small, completely formalizable processes and their execution entirely on computers. This research direction has produced process modeling languages suitable for machine rather than human consumption. The MVP project, launched at the University of Maryland and continued at Universität Kaiserslautern, emphasizes the building of descriptive models of large, real-world processes and their uses by humans and computers for the purpose of understanding, analysis, execution guidance and improvement. The language MVP-L has been developed with these purposes in mind. In this paper, we motivate the need for MVP-L, introduce the language, and demonstrate its uses. It should be noticed, that MVP-L is only a prototype. We assume that further improvements to our language will be triggered by lessons learned from future applications and experiments.