{"id":8113,"date":"2022-06-06T04:20:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T04:20:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/modeling-languages.com\/?p=8113"},"modified":"2022-06-06T04:58:12","modified_gmt":"2022-06-06T04:58:12","slug":"process-software-modeling-spem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/modeling-languages.com\/process-software-modeling-spem\/","title":{"rendered":"Software process modeling with SPEM"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every new technology introduces new dimensions and challenges that must be considered when building software. Modern software teams are multidisciplinary<\/strong> and often need to include other profiles beyond developers and software engineers, such as data scientists, psychologists and AI experts.<\/p>\n

These new profiles must be coordinated with the more “traditional” profiles. And may require more explicit guidelines to be able to integrate within software engineering processes in place at the company.\u00a0 As such, enterprises need to revise, clarify and adapt their software engineering best practices and follow a clear process to manage the lifecycle of a product. In our opinion, this is going to revive the interest in software process modeling (and therefore on software process modeling languages), especially focused on new types of software, such as smart software<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Benefits of process modeling<\/h2>\n

Analysts, architects, engineers and other stakeholders engaged on a software development project often face typical challenges and flaws in managing and communicating knowledge and information about their internal and external processes that usually drive confusion and misalignment on expectations and goals.<\/span><\/p>\n

Practices for both traditional and lean & agile software and systems development, spanning from business problem statement and requirements definition through acceptance testing, integration, deployment and operations, are well-known and spread across the industry due to their significant benefits. Standards define the activities, tasks, milestones, work products and roles & skills required to start, execute and successfully complete a development process in an organization given a specific situation, problem, goal and culture.<\/span><\/p>\n

A fully-documented process helps teams to adopt and follow engineering best practices and is critical to complying with regulatory standards such as ISO 26262, SPICE, and CMMi. A framework that includes those processes provides full visibility and traceability about how the work is structured and required to be executed within an organization and its context, along with the responsibilities of their participants and the standards & knowledge it is based on. Those frameworks act as guidelines for configuration and execution, and must include models and metrics for monitoring and continuous improvement.<\/span><\/p>\n

The new momentum<\/h2>\n

Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, Behavioral Software, Cyber-Physical Systems\u2026 New technologies and techniques have become rapidly in the last years a key core element of several software products. Traditionally, the first versions of those components have been developed by people from an area other than software engineering \u2013like psychology, mathematics and statistics\u2013 and therefore are not used to follow engineering principles and best practices to build a modern application ready for mass consumption.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nowadays, building competitive software requires a joint effort of people from different backgrounds. New technologies introduce new dimensions and challenges to be addressed when building software. Enterprises need to apply and adapt (software) engineering best practices and follow an end-to-end method to manage the development, deployment, monitoring and operating of hybrid systems at scale, by streamlining activities, and fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration across diverse skills. Their ultimate goal should be to increase the predictability, productivity and business impact of their teams. The lack of a process is a ballast for any modern software team configuration.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note that this is a clear contrast from the agile trend, where “formal” process modeling was seen as least important. We believe it is now coming back as the needs for complex interdisciplinary software requires it.<\/p>\n

A standard language for modeling software processes<\/h2>\n

The Software Process Engineering Metamodel Specification<\/a> (SPEM) is an OMG\u2019s standard used to describe software development processes or a family of related software development processes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The elements of SPEM can be categorized into method contents or processes. Method content are the roles defining development skills and responsibilities, tasks that those roles perform, and artifacts or work products that are the inputs and outputs of the tasks. The elements of a given method content are then assets to be combined and included into any process. A development process is a sequence of tasks performed by roles and makes explicit how work products are created and evolve over time.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Key terminology. Image from the SPEM 2.0 specification available as OMG formal\/2008-04-01<\/p><\/div>\n

As the specification states:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe scope of SPEM is purposely limited to the minimal elements necessary to define any software and systems development process, without adding specific features for particular development domains or disciplines. (…) SPEM 2.0 does not aim to be a generic process modeling language, nor does it even provide its own behavior modeling concepts. (…) SPEM 2.0 focuses on providing the additional information structures that you need for processes modeled with UML 2.0 Activities or BPMN\/BPDM to describe an actual development process.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Such an approach makes SPEM an extremely flexible metamodel for process engineers to model their company-specific processes, either by following and adopting a standard framework to their concrete needs and purposes, or by documenting their own processes from scratch.<\/span><\/p>\n

Due to its \u201ccomplementary\u201d nature to UML 2.0 Activities or BPMN\/BPDM specifications, SPEM has been adopted in a very scattered way by the different tool providers and other organizations. Thus, its aim and industry adoption is not quite clear: shall SPEM be used to adopt a model-driven engineering approach for process analysis and execution or it is yet another language limited to document specifications but not easing an actual process enactment? Does it cover an actual gap or could we continue using other specifications which, combined, provide the needed output?<\/span><\/p>\n

Nevertheless, since the publication of SPEM 2.0 specification in 2008, most of the popular software modeling tools added its artifacts to their toolboxes and provided users with the ability to define processes following this standard. Let\u2019s take a look at them.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tools that support SPEM<\/h2>\n

While SPEM is the standard language for process modeling (with the caveats mentioned in the previous section), tool support for actually using it in practice is rather limited. Let’s see what are the available options.<\/p>\n

Eclipse Process Framework Composer<\/h3>\n

The <\/span>Eclipse Process Framework Composer<\/span><\/a> is the tool and conceptual framework provided by the Eclipse group for authoring, tailoring and deploying development process frameworks. Its latest version is the 1.5.2 and was released back in 2018. Its first version supported their own specification language \u2013named UMA\u2013 which was based on SPEM 1.1 and included some artifacts and extensions that were added to SPEM 2.0 shortly after. Latest mentions of EPF Composer in Eclipse forums date back from 2018 and the project, though promising and still downloadable and functioning, looks abandoned.<\/span><\/p>\n

The main features of this platform encompass the authoring, configuring, publishing and browsing of methods and processes. All components of the SPEM specification are available in EPF Composer, including an explicit division between method content and processes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The users of this platform can create processes either via breakdown structure editors or workflow diagram editors; from scratch or by adopting an existing framework. The platform\u2019s key feature \u2013as the main differentiator with other tools included in this post\u2013 is the ability to create and reuse process building blocks (known as capability patterns) that represent best practices that can be assembled to compose new processes and methods. In defining a process, then, one can use some or all of the elements of a method content library.<\/span><\/p>\n

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EPF Composer user interface, displaying information from the OpenUP method plugin provided by Eclipse.<\/p><\/div>\n

The EPF Composer\u2019s installation package includes reusable plug-ins and method libraries for some common development frameworks, such as OpenUP, Extreme Programming and Scrum. So, the users can tailor, adapt, extend and enact these frameworks within their own organizations for their specific project needs.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally, the frameworks created with EPF Composer can be published and deployed as websites, so that all members of the organization can access and navigate through the complete up-to-date information, regulation and practices about their development processes. Processes could also be exported as templates for Microsoft Project.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Example of the webpage describing the OpenUP’s Initiate Project activity provided by Eclipse.<\/p><\/div>\n

IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Method Composer<\/h3>\n

A commercial equivalent of EPF Composer is the <\/span>IBM Engineering Lifecycle Optimization – Method Composer<\/span><\/a>, now in its version 7.6.2 that was released in 2020. It fully supports the SPEM 2.0 specification and we can describe this platform as an EPF Composer <\/span>on steroids<\/span><\/i>: this IBM solution is part of the company\u2019s suite for software development, management and governance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apart from the main features available in the open-source platform, it includes an extended catalog of pre-defined processes such as RUP and some other relevant extensions:<\/span><\/p>\n