Enriching software process support by knowledge-based techniques

Representations of activities dealing with the development or maintenance of software are called software process models. Process models allow for communication, reasoning, guidance, improvement, and automation. Two approaches for modeling processes and instantiating and managing the process models, namely CoMo-Kit and MVP-E, are combined to build a more powerful one. CoMo-Kit is based on AI/KE technology; it is a support tool system for general complex design processes, and was not been developed specifically with software development processes in mind. MVP-E is a process-sensitive software engineering environment for modeling and analyzing software development processes, and guides software developers. Additionally it provides services to establish and run measurement programmes in software organizations. Because both approaches were developed independently from one another, major integration efforts had to be made to combine both their advantages. This article concentrates on the resulting language concepts, and their operationalization necessary for building automated process support.