- 1 - Decentralised Process Modelling

In this paper, we advocate decentralised process modelling and suggest that understanding and modelling the development processes of individual development participants is the key to supporting collaborative development. Our approach relies on recognising individual developers’ states (“situations”) by analysing local development histories. Different situations can be used to trigger a variety of further development actions, such as consistency checks between process models of different development participants. We report on experience using regular expressions to specify particular situations and rules to associate actions with these situations. 1. Motivation and Background A significant proportion of large software development projects involve the participation and collaboration of many development participants, who in turn may be physically distributed. Software process modelling and technology address a wide range of issues surrounding the specification and development of complex systems, including the description of the activities by which software is developed, and supporting this with automated tools [6]. While an understanding of the processes by which software systems are developed is valuable, we believe that understanding and describing “fine-grain” software processes is equally worthwhile, and an effective approach to tackling many of the problems associated with decentralised development is therefore particularly useful. By “fine-grain” we are referring to (a) developer level processes which describe the activities of individual development participants rather than organisations, and (b) representation level processes which can manipulate elements of representation schemes (e.g., specification languages) rather than treating them as “vanilla” objects whose structure and content is irrelevant or unknown [11]. To perform fine-grain process modelling and reap its benefits, many issues of decentralised software development need to be addressed. These include the specification of coordination behaviour between both individual development participants and teams of developers. Ben-Shaul and Kaiser [1] for example, adopt an “international alliance” metaphor in which participating “countries” adhere to “treaties” (c.ƒ. process models) and engage in “summits” (at which process models are enacted). This approach addresses the broad problem of decentralised development between teams of developers rather than individual participants. Engels and Groenewegen [3] propose an approach to specifying the coordinated behaviour of different “objects” using a formalism called Paradigm which, in * (to appear in) Proceedings of EWSPT ’95, Noordwijkerhout, Holland, 3-5th April 1995, Springer-Verlag.