The incremental commitment model process patterns for rapid-fielding projects
ICSP'10 Proceedings of the 2010 international conference on New modeling concepts for today's software processes: software process
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Research experience has suggested that software processes should be thought of as a kind of software, which can be developed into composable component pieces that can be executed to perform different software lifecycle activities. General experience has indicated that the activities conducted while developing COTS-based applications (CBA) differ greatly from those conducted in traditional custom development. The primary research questions addressed in this dissertation are (1) Can these activity differences be characterized and statistically analyzed? (2) If so, can the primary CBA activity classes be organized into a decision framework for projects developing CBA's? The resulting research provides a value-based composable set of processes for CBAs that includes an associated Process Decision Framework (PDF), a set of Composable Process Elements (CPEs), and a COCOTS Risk Analyzer. A composable process implies the ability to construct a specific process from a higher level and broader process framework and a set of reusable process elements. The PDF is a recursive, re-entrant configuration structure, and establishes the relationships among a mix of the CPEs and other process fragments which are extended from the risk-driven WinWin Spiral model. The CPEs includes Assessment, Tailoring, and Glue code development/integration, which are the three primary sources of effort due to CBA development considerations, indicated by empirical analysis on both large industry and small campus e-services CBA projects. Each CPE is a defined, repeatable workflow. While the framework provides a composition basis to support developers for navigating through the option space in developing CBAs, the three process elements establish the basic constituents for composing COTS processes based on common process patterns identified in empirical studies. A technique named COCOTS Risk Analyzer, is also developed and implemented to aid the optimization of process decisions via risk based prioritization strategy. All together, the proposed solution supports flexible composition of process elements with respect to evolving stakeholders' value propositions, COTS market, and risk considerations. To validate the value-based set of processes, experiments have been designed and performed on student projects at USC graduate level software engineering class in Fall 2004 and Fall 2005 semesters. The evaluation results show that applying the value-based processes significantly improves the team performance.