Quality Ensuring Development of Software Processes

Software development is a complex process where many organizational units, persons, systems and artifacts are involved. In companies that exceed a certain size the business processes become difficult to handle and the quality of the product can decrease. A process-oriented view on software development is increasingly popular witnessed by current publications on the software development process and the application of modern quality management systems. The ISO 9000 norm describes a quality management system that provides a process oriented view on general production processes and is widely used in many industries. In this paper we suggest a systematic way of describing and developing software processes that contain certain desirable properties and fulfill quality management demands. Therefore, the design pattern approach known from object-oriented software engineering will be adapted to the modeling of business processes. Using this approach the requirements of the ISO 9000 norm can be translated to software development process patterns. These patterns can be used in modeling or reengineering the business processes of a software company in a way that the processes fulfill important properties of quality management systems and improve the overall quality of the resulting software product. Additionally, finding quality management patterns in software development processes can indicate the existence of a functioning quality management system to certification authorities and customers.