A Synthesis of Two Process Support Approaches

Process support approaches use process models to allow for communication, reasoning, guidance, improvement, and automation. Two approaches are compared and combined to build a more powerful one. In this paper we describe the synthesis of the CoMo-Kit and MVP-E approaches. CoMo-Kit is based on AI/KE technology. It was developed for supporting complex design processes and is not specialized to software development. MVP-E is an environment for modeling, analyzing, and guiding which additionally provides services to establish and run measurement programmes in software organizations. Differences between both approaches are identified which are then used as alternatives when deriving requirements for process support environments. The discussion helps understand what is intrinsic to processes in general and what is special to software development processes in particular. Synthesizing both process support systems, which were developed completely independently, allows to alternate planning and enaction of software development processes.