Emergent process design

Abstract

The typical situation in software developing organizations can be characterized by two extremes: in some organizations or organizational units, software development processes are partly defined, whereas in organizations or organizational units where the processses are well defined, these processes are usually only valid at the project start. For design of a process that is able to fulfil the requirements, the author proposes an emergent process design (EPD) approach. The EPD approach guides the extraction and the adaptation of a project-specific process. This is done as follows. Initially, the project-specific process frame is extracted by tailoring one of the process variants provided in a process line. The first development is based on the tailored process frame. For further development iterations or projects that are to utilize this frame, the frame is adapted and refined to the project-specific process based on the logs of the performed tasks in the previous process iteration. In order to insure the desired quality of the final product, the project-specific process becomes more stringent over the course of the project.