Describing working environments in OPM

Abstract

In OPM, each software process provides a working environment in which programmers can actually work in order to accomplish a designated task, rather than prescribing the algorithm of the task [1], or giving a behavioral description of the task [4]. A process will (i) collect necessary resources, (ii) collect necessary activities, and (iii) specify certain constraint on the execution of activities. A process will also (iv) navigate activities to be performed by a human, (v) execute activities asked by a human, and (vi) execute some activities automatically when certain conditions are met. Each working environment may consist of a different set of resources and activities depending on the task to be performed within it. Thus the software development environment as a whole will be a collection of smaller and heterogeneous working environments. In OPM, process templates are described in a process programming language called Galois [3] which is an extension of C++ [2]. As an example consider the working on bug process illustrated in Figure 1. In the working on bug process, a typical edit-compile-run cycle will be performed in order to fix a bug of given source files. Figure 2 will give a skeleton of the working on bug process in Galois.