Towards a Computer - Aided Process

Today, the development of large software systems is very diicult to manage. Traditional tools do not address the issue of designing and improving the development process as a whole while methods that do address this issue are, in general, not supported by tools. This paper presents a set of services that a Computer-Aided Process-Engineering (CAPE) system might ooer. We also describe various levels of explicitness of process descriptions and argue that the more formal rigor is applied in describing a process the more automated support is possible and the more improvement bene-ts can be achieved. Finally, we describe levels of conformance of process desciption and performed process and relate those levels to the previously deened levels of explicitness. Again, we argue that the more formal the model the more support is possible and the more conformance can be achieved. We must stress, however, that we are not aware of any software system that ooers the services proposed in this paper. Therefore currently, without a CAPE tool at hand the beneets of formal Supported by a fellowship from IBM Canada IBM contact for this paper is: process models are limited.