Engineering Software Design Processes to Guide Process Execution

Using systematic development processes is an important characteristic of any mature engineering discipline. In current software practice, Software Design Methodologies (SDMs) are intended to be used to help design software more systematically. This paper explicitly shows, however, that one well-known example of such an SDM, Booch Object-Oriented Design (BOOD), as described in the literature is far too vague to provide speciic guidance to designers, and is too imprecise and incomplete to be considered as a fully systematic process for speciic projects. To provide more eeective and appropriate guidance and control in software design processes, we applied the process programming concept to the design process. Given two diierent sets of plausible process requirements , we elaborated two more detailed and precise design processes that are responsive to these requirements. We have also implemented, experimented with, and evaluated a prototype (called Debus-Booch) that supports the execution of these detailed processes.