A unified approach for software process representation and analysis

This paper presents a unified approach for software process management which combines object-oriented (OO) structures with formal models based on (high-level timed) Petri nets. This pairing may be proved beneficial not only for the integrated representation of software development processes, human resources and work products, but also in analysing properties and detecting errors of a software process specification, before the process is put to actual use. The use of OO models provides the advantages of graphical abstraction, highlevel of understanding and manageable representation of software process classes and instances. Resulted OO models are mechanically transformed into a high-level timed Petri net representation to derive a model for formally proving process properties as well as applying managerial analysis. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by addressing a simple software process modelling example problem used in the literature to exercise various software process modelling notations.