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Special Panel: Towards a Manifesto for Rich Process Models Andreas Rausch
Marco Kuhrmann
Clausthal University of Technology Software Systems Engineering Albrecht-von-Groddeck-Str. 7, 38678 Clausthal, Germany
Technische Universität München Software & Systems Engineering Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany
[email protected]
[email protected]
ABSTRACT In the agile community, there is a strong commitment to the few and simple principles and values that are collected in the agile manifesto. Those are a common guideline and a value system for agile methods. Rich process models suffer in having such principles and values. In this special panel, we aim at initiating a discussion on commonly agreed principles and values in rich process models, and at starting the work on a “Manifesto for Rich Process Models”.
Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.9 [Management]: Software process models
General Terms Management, Economics, Human Factors, Standardization.
Keywords Rich process models, principles, values.
1. MOTIVATION Software development process models exist in a variety that ranges from agile methods (e.g., XP or Scrum) to comprehensive process models (e.g., RUP, V-Modell XT, or Hermes) – each with its specific area of application. Especially the agile methods became popular in recent years. They mainly target human aspects, such as the team, and, thus, they are very welcome to developers. On the other hand, there exist integrated and comprehensive process models. Those models address not only project teams but also organizations as a whole by considering and formalizing, for example, organization structures, interfaces to business processes, and technical infrastructures. Hence, they include a variety of contents, documentation, templates and guidelines; and they also accompany tools whereby they are also known as ‘heavy-weight’ or ‘rich’ process models. The Missing Thing... Besides of the content’s volume, structures and other aspects, agile methods have something that is missing to rich development process models: The Manifesto for Agile Software Development [1].
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). ICSSP’11, May 21–22, 2011, Waikiki, Honolulu, HI, USA. Copyright 2011 ACM 978-1-4503-0730-7/11/05.
The agile manifesto summarizes values and principles that agile software development projects and teams should follow, such as: • • • •
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools Working software over comprehensive documentation Customer collaboration over contract negotiation Responding to change over following a plan
In agile methods, the decisions on how to organize the projects and on how to work are basically left to the project participants. Project teams can select their methods from a huge pool, e.g., Unit Testing, Test-driven Development, or Pair-Programming. Projects have a defined goal and the teams have the freedom to decide on how to achieve their goal. In the agile community, there is a strong commitment to the principles and values and, thus, there is a high acceptance of the various agile methods. Moreover, as these principles and values are widely accepted in the agile community, there exists a common guideline and value system for further improvements of agile methods and future directions. A Manifesto for Rich Process Models. Rich (software development) process models yet lack for a comparable manifesto. Same as for agile methods, a variety of process models exist – either directly based on a comprehensive standard process model, such as RUP, or at least built on the standardized software process metamodels, such as SPEM. Even if the process metamodels are used to develop (new) process models, there neither exist a commonly accepted method nor a set of ‘basic rules’, ‘principles’, and ‘values’ that needs to be considered during the process development. As a consequence, the resulting process models are often seen as the “toy” of quality management divisions or a “thing” that has to be used by contract conditions, and therefore, is declined by project teams. Rich process models are developed in response to organizations’ requirements and do not follow an agreed set of values and principles with respect to the project teams. However, has this to be a contradiction? Rich process models usually need to be tailored according to organization-, or projectspecific requirements. The basic process model is therefore a comprehensive, often generic, knowledgebase. Processes and artifact descriptions need, for example, to be embellished either by a process engineer or by the project teams. Especially at project-level, teams have to decide, e.g., on how process model artifacts are implemented in the project. Also the selection of concrete (tool-supported) methods is also of importance to make the
© ACM. PREPRINT. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in the conference/workshop proceedings.
project operation as efficient as possible. In practice, many teams introduce methods into their projects that are already well known from the agile ones, for example, Unit Testing, or Test-driven Development. Hence, the gap between rich process models and agile methods isn’t insuperable. Can we thereby apply the agile manifesto on rich processes, too? Since rich process models follow another philosophy, we think not. The reason is that agile methods are focused on software development and the tempers of the team, rather than on, e.g., regulations, standards, contracting (things that are often missing in agile methods) that is, in turn, in scope of rich process models. Rich processes create a blueprint of a software development project as a whole including their embedding into organizations. Thus, values and principles for rich process models cannot only focus on ‘individuals’ or ‘change’, but have also to take into account the “environmental” requirements.
2. THE SESSION’S GOAL In this special session at ICSSP 2011 “Towards a Manifesto for Rich Process Models”, we want to initiate a discussion about the common principles and values for rich process models. The session is organized as follows: 1.
Short position papers and invited talks will provide proposals for aspects of principles and values for rich process models.
2.
Based on these proposals, we want to elaborate within the second part of the session a first, initial set of commonly accepted principles and values for rich process models.
The invited speakers present examples and their experiences made with rich processes and/or agile methods. The discussion also contains thoughts about whether or not principles of agile methods can be applied on rich process models and if so, to what extent they can be applied. Aspects that are relevant to rich process models, but are missing in the agile manifesto, shall be elaborated in this session.
The panel’s presentations and discussions aim at collecting and structuring proposals for principles and values that should become “common sense” for rich process models. Furthermore a community shall be founded to collect, develop, and disseminate the principles and values.
3. FURTHER WORK This special panel is the first step in the initiation of a rich process model community. To establish this community, the following steps are planed as further activities: 1.
After the session, we open and extend the discussion about the principles and values for rich process models via an online accessible open wiki-forum.
2.
After two to three months, the moderated Internet discussion will be closed and a final “Manifesto for Rich Process Models” will be released on the web including a list of supporters.
A follow-up workshop or session will be organized to present, discuss, and improve the manifesto within the community.
4. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We want to thank the organizers of the International Conference on Software Systems Process 2011 for providing the possibilities to initiate the discussion. We also thank the invited speakers for providing their position statements for this session.
5. REFERENCES [1] Beck, K. et al. 2001. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Online: http://agilemanifesto.org.
