Process-Based Software Engineering: Building the Infrastructures

  • Authors:

  • Yingxu Wang;Antony Bryant

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 wangyx@enel.ucalgary.ca;School of Information Management, Leeds Metropolitan University, Beckett Park, Leeds LS6 3QS, UK a.bryant@lmu.ac.uk

  • Venue:
  • Annals of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

A recent trend in software engineering is the shift from a focus on laboratory-oriented software engineering to a more industry-oriented view of software engineering processes. This complements preceding ideas about software engineering in terms of organization and process-orientation. From the domain coverage point of view, many of the existing software engineering approaches have mainly concentrated on the technical aspects of software development. Important areas of software engineering, such as the technical and organizational infrastructures, have been left untouched. As software systems increase in scales, issues of complexity and professional practices become involved. Software development as an academic or laboratory activity, has to engage with software development as a key industrialized process.This expanded domain of software engineering exposes the limitations of existing methodologies that often address only individual subdomains. There is, therefore, a demand for an overarching approach that provide a basis for theoretical and practical infrastructures capable of accommodating the whole range of modern software engineering practices and requirements. One approach is provided by Process-Based Software Engineering (PBSE); part of the more general trend towards a focus on process.This paper provides a review of process techniques for software engineering and a high-level perspective on PBSE. Typical approaches and techniques for the establishment, assessment, improvement and benchmarking of software engineering process systems are introduced in this paper, and many are developed further in other contributions to this volume.