Software project activity network for managing the development and testing process

Abstract

The software project activity network (SPAN), similar to a PERT network, is developed for the effective and correct management of the software development and testing process. The software project activity network follows naturally from the structural dependency properties of the system under development and the strategy and plan for its testing and integration. The software project activity network supports development and testing of systems developed in structured languages, and is very appropriate for systems written in Ada due to the explicit and formal definitions of dependencies in the Ada language. The software project activity network semantics accommodate the various possibilities for the outcome of testing activities and potential subsequent repetition of those activities (e.g. regression testing and software rework). The concept of testing configuration management is introduced, as each test identifies a particular sub-configuration or version of the ultimate system, augmented with test procedures. Change control points are rigorously identified in the software project activity network, providing complete test reproducibility and testing configuration management. Rigorous models of the coupled state transitions of the three object types minimally necessary for software development and testing models are presented. Since the software project activity network management model readily integrates its state transition models with commercial configuration control tools, implementations of it will be a key element in software development environments (SDE). The prototype implementation in Ada of the SPAN model and its integration with a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) configuration management tool is discussed.