Metamodelling for Software Engineering

6.3 PROCESS ASPECTS

Process aspects in ISO/IEC 24744 are represented abstractly by the metaclass WorkUnitKind. WorkUnitKind is characterized by a purpose and a minimum capability level at which it makes sense to perform the associated work units. This class is related to the class Outcome in a one-to-many fashion, so that a set of outcomes can be defined for each specific kind of work unit. Also, WorkUnit/*Kind holds a whole–part relationship to Task/*Kind, so that any work unit or work unit kind can be defined as a collection of tasks or task kinds, respectively. This allows for the recursive definition of units of work down to the necessary level of detail.

WorkUnit/*Kind has three major subtypes (Figure 6.9):

• Task/*Kind: These are small-grained goals, depicting what must be achieved in order to attain a particular, stated purpose.
• Technique/*Kind: These are also small-grained goals but they focus on the “how” rather than the “what”.
• Process/*Kind: In contrast, these are large-grained areas of expertise rather than goals. Processes can be recursively defined as necessary to represent the varying needs of different software development groups and methodology paradigms for large-grained work units at a series of granularity levels.

Also shown in Figure 6.9 are TaskTechniqueMapping/*Kind. These two classes link Task/*Kind and Technique/*Kind and provide both a classification of how that link is effected as well as giving guidelines on the usage of such a link. (These linkage classes ...