Scoping Software Process Models - Initial Concepts and Experience from Defining Space Standards
This addresses the problem of balancing process variability and control for large development organizations, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing scoping methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of defining the scope of software process standards by proposing concepts based on future products, projects, and process capabilities, and shares experience from applying this to space standards for satellite software development.
Defining process standards by integrating, harmonizing, and standardizing heterogeneous and often implicit processes is an important task, especially for large development organizations. However, many challenges exist, such as limiting the scope of process standards, coping with different levels of process model abstraction, and identifying relevant process variabilities to be included in the standard. On the one hand, eliminating process variability by building more abstract models with higher degrees of interpretation has many disadvantages, such as less control over the process. Integrating all kinds of variability, on the other hand, leads to high process deployment costs. This article describes requirements and concepts for determining the scope of process standards based on a characterization of the potential products to be produced in the future, the projects expected for the future, and the respective process capabilities needed. In addition, the article sketches experience from determining the scope of space process standards for satellite software development. Finally, related work with respect to process model scoping, conclusions, and an outlook on future work are presented.