Impact of the supported coordination levels on process modelling techniques

Abstract

Three different coordination problems have been identified: organising the work of loosely related agents, of highly interacting agents, and of one agent in the limit of external constraints. These three types of coordination occur in software development environment, at least from the point of view of the factory organisation, team behaviour and individual activity.

Due to the intrinsic discrepancy between the different types of coordination problems, at least from the process presentation need and execution principle point of view, the modelling and support systems for all of them cannot be based on a single technique. Furthermore, the different coordination levels are interdependent: constraints defined at one level have to be propagated to the others, or to be consistent with other levels coordination requirements. Thus, to provide a complete process modelling and support system, we will have to study how to integrate and relate several process modelling and execution paradigms.