Visualization

• Providing users with graphic views of process models and instances that can be viewed, navigationally traversed, interactively edited, and animated to convey process statics and dynamics.
• Experience: Process visualizations enable intuitive analysis and discovery.
• Experience: Visualization appears key to acceptability.

Image files that show user interface displays of (a) software life cycle model, (b) mutli-site process interaction hand-offs, (c) rich picture of a system-user process, (d) process navigation model, and (e) Web process navigation (detail). Tools incorporating process visualization include (a) visual process model editor, (b) spreadsheet-like process browser, (c) graphical process model browser, and (d) graphical process object browser can be viewed when selected.

Prototyping, Walkthrough, and Performance Support (Training On Demand)

• Incrementally enacting partially specified process model instances in order to evaluate process presentation scenarios to end users, prior to performing tool and data integration.
• Experience: Process prototyping and walkthrough is effective enabler for eliciting user feedback.
• Experience: Can provide a basis for user empowerment in controlling design and improvement of local processes.
• Experience: Generation of performance support materials in response to process improvements or changes is well-received.

A process prototype example. Other image files that show user interface displays of (a) a process walkthrough display, and (b) a view of automatically generated process performance support documentation, followed by (c) another subsequent view of this support documentation produced in HTML can be seen when selected.

Transition Planning and Change Management

• Collaboratively developing a plan identifying the incremental steps organizational participants agree to perform in order to implement redesigned processes within their organization.
• Changing organizational processes takes time, effort, and other resources, as well as the prioritized commitment of participants to make it succeed.
• Transition is a process that incrementally transforms an existing, "as-is" process into a "to-be" form
• This transtition process is also known as the "here-to-there" process.
• Experience: Transition planning is itself a process that is often overlooked, resulting in negative consequences.
• Experience: Radical process changes can be accomplished in small, incremental steps.
• Experience: Participants not commited to process change can engage in "counter-implementation" activities that seek to undercut transition efforts.

Examples selected from a recent BPR engagement displaying a process transition plan with prioritized and scheduled transition steps, plus designation of responsible participants, can be found here.

A case study that describes an approach to process change management and transition can be found in W. Scacchi, Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet-based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study, J. Information Technology and Management, 2(3), 313-334, 2001.

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Administration: Process Staffing and Scheduling

• Assigning and scheduling specified users, tools, and development data objects to modeled user roles, product milestones, and development schedule.
• Experience: Incremental and heuristic rescheduling functions always impress managers.
• Experience: This demonstrates scheduling flexibility that may not be available in other tools.

Image files that show user interface displays of (a) a process action precedence order to be scheduled, (b) an initial staff schedule assignment, and (c) an optimized schedule assignment after process analysis and improvement transformations, which can be viewed when selected.

Integration: User Interface, Data, Embedded Links, Tools

• Encapsulating or wrapping selected information systems, repositories, and data objects that are to be invoked or manipulated when enacting a process instance.
• Level 0. Process integration [MS92] enables the configuration (via incremental modeling) and binding of individual developers to development roles, process tasks, and product components to appropriate (client-side) tools.
• Level 1. MIME object type integration tools/applications exist unmodified as 'helper applications', or require auxiliary tools (e.g. Web based forms) for interaction.
• Level 2. Virtual file system/object base integration enables remote object types to be accessed or updated as if they reside in a local repository (network file system)
• Level 3. (Typed) Link integrationenables Semantic Web style integratioin, whereby embedded hyperlinks are associated with computational functions that are executed when traversed.
• Level 4. Application programming interface integrationthat enables fully embedded applications to execute with explicit process support
• Experience: Can entail a lot of difficult technical work, but its relatively easy to finesse at Levels 0 and 1, enabling construction "concept demostrations."
• Experience: Growing interest in providing support for integration of wide-area heterogeneous information repositories using the Internet.

Image files that show user interface displays of (a) multiple tools bound to process actions that are integrated with underlying object manager (not shown) via software broadcast message server (not shown).

A paper describing the strategy and mechanisms supporting process integration can be found in, P. Mi and W. Scacchi, Process Integration for CASE Environments, IEEE Software, 9(2), 45-53 (1992). Reprinted in Computer-Aided Software Engineering , 2nd. Edition, E. Chikofsky (ed.), IEEE Computer Society, (1993).

Target Support Environment Generation

• Automatically transforming a process model or instance into a process-based computing environment that selectively presents prototyped or integrated information systems to end-users for process enactment.
• Employs same mechanisms as employed to support process prototyping, except now with process task/action-specific tool/application and artifact/resource bindings in place.
• Experience: Considered a unique capability, not available in other software process engineering environments.
• Experience: Simplifies or eliminates low-level process programming via "application generator" techniques.

Image files that show user interface displays of software process environment generated via automated transformation of the modeled and integrated process. The following process sequence displays a generated process environment through the sequence of (a) a role-based access control process environment, (b) process product artifact view, (c) requirements specification process step document, (d) another requirements artifact, and (e) an example of an embedded text editor (Emacs) integrated as a helper application for editing a process step artifacts, a C source code module.

A description of this mechanism can be found in the paper P.K. Garg, P. Mi, T. Pham, W. Scacchi, and G. Thunquest, The SMART Approach to Software Process Engineering, Proc. 16th. Intern. Conf. Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, Sorrento, Italy, 341-350, (1994). Reprinted in P.K. Garg and M. Jazayeri, (eds.), Process-Centered Software Engineering Environments, IEEE Computer Society Press, 130-140, 1995.

Related approaches to "meta-environments" can be found in A.Karrer and W. Scacchi, Meta-Environments for Software Production, in Advances in Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering , Vol. 4, 1995.