Software Process Definition: a Reuse-based Approach

Software product development has been taking advantage of reuse techniques for some decades. Concepts like software components, architectures, and product lines have been successfully applied in several contexts to develop software products, although some difficulties are still faced. Software processes have strong similarities with software products, and some researchers argue that they are software too. Therefore, we believe that software processes may take advantage of some benefits expected by the use of existing software products reuse techniques, adapted to software processes. It is also possible that similar difficulties are faced. This paper presents a software process definition approach based on reuse techniques, which aims at making some of the benefits expected by software product reuse available to software process definition activities. Concepts such as process components, architectures, process lines and features are described and used. We describe the proposed approach, tools developed to support it, and also results of a survey on the expected benefits and difficulties on software process reuse in the point of view of experienced software process engineers.