Metamodelling for Software Engineering

3.2 METAMODELLING FOR PROCESSES

Some of the terminological problems relevant to software development methodologies were identified in Chapter 1; in particular, the terms method and methodology were discussed. We have also noted that, in the method engineering community, it is common to consider a methodology as having two aspects: product and process. Forgetting for the moment that this ignores the roles that people play in the development process, we can say that this terminology, aimed at the level of methodological description and definition, tries to discriminate what is being manipulated (work products) from the ways and times that these manipulations occur (process). Since the creation and maintenance of work products in a vacuum is impossible, and thus a process component of a methodology is identified as being vital, it is common for methodologies to be referred to, confusingly and incorrectly, as simply “processes”. Such confusion is confounded by the observation that in other software engineering areas, the word “process” is used distinctly differently. For example, in the US industry, a process typically refers to the enactment (of a methodology), also known as a process model, which is in many ways similar to the software process improvement (SPI) area of software engineering since capability assessment is always evaluated by observing a process in action (i.e. when it is being enacted). For our present discussion, we tend to consider a method in terms of process, product ...