Fachbereich Informatik

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, the resources needed, and the productivity and quality aspects involved. 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 concentrates on 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 building descriptive models of large, real-world processes and their use by humans and computers for the purpose of understanding, analyzing, guiding and improving software development projects. The language MVP-L has been developed with these purposes in mind. In this paper, we motivate the need for MVP-L, introduce the prototype language, and demonstrate its uses. We assume that further improvements to our language will be triggered by lessons learned from applications and experiments. refer to earlier versions of the language and are not entirely consistent with this language report. Future publications will be based on this version of MVP-L.