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Requirements and constructors for tailoring software processes: a systematic literature review

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Abstract

Organizations developing software-based systems or services often need to tailor process reference models—including product-oriented and project-oriented processes—to meet both their own characteristics and those of their projects. Existing process reference models, however, are often defined in a generic manner. They typically offer only limited mechanisms for adapting processes to the needs of organizational units, project goals, and project environments. This article presents a systematic literature review of peer-reviewed conference and journal articles published between 1990 and 2009. Our aim was both to identify requirements for process-tailoring notation and to analyze those tailoring mechanisms that are currently in existence and that consistently support process tailoring. The results show that the software engineering community has demonstrated an ever-increasing interest in software process tailoring, ranging from the consideration of theoretical proposals regarding how to tailor processes to the scrutiny of practical experiences in organizations. Existing tailoring mechanisms principally permit the modeling of variations of activities, artifacts, or roles by insertion or deletion. Two types of variations have been proposed: the individual modification of process elements and the simultaneous variation of several process elements. Resolving tailoring primarily refers to selecting or deselecting optional elements or to choosing between alternatives. It is sometimes guided by explicitly defined processes and supported by tools or mechanisms from the field of knowledge engineering. The study results show that tailoring notations are not as mature as the industry requires if they are to provide the kind of support for process tailoring that fulfills the requirements identified, i.e., including security policies for the whole process, or carrying out one activity rather than another. A notation must therefore be built, which takes these requirements into consideration in order to permit variant-rich processes representation and use this variability to consistently support process tailoring.

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Acknowledgments

This work is partially supported by the Program FPU of the Spanish Ministerio de Educación and by the PEGASO/MAGO (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional, TIN2009-13718-C02-01), MEDUSAS (Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico e Industrial (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación), IDI-20090557), ALTAMIRA (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-la Mancha, Fondo Social Europeo, PII2I09-0106-2463), and INGENIOSO (Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-la Mancha, PEII11-0025-9533) projects. We would also like to thank Sonnhild Namingha from Fraunhofer IESE for reviewing the first version of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Alarcos Research Group, Department of Information Technologies and Systems, Escuela Superior de Informática, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Paseo de la Universidad 4, 13071, Ciudad Real, Spain

    Tomás Martínez-Ruiz, Félix García & Mario Piattini

  2. University of Helsinki, Gustaf Hällströmin katu 2b, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Jürgen Münch

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  1. Tomás Martínez-Ruiz
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Correspondence to Tomás Martínez-Ruiz.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Requirements summarization and classification

This appendix summarizes all the requirements for building a variability notation that we have found in the systematic literature review. These could be divided into five categories, according to the aspect of the notation. Each one of these categories represents a sub-goal that needs to be achieved in order to define the variability notation. A more exhaustive description of these categories and the requisites they include is provided in the following sections.

  1. 1.

    Variation support for process model elements.

  2. 2.

    Types of supported variation (optional, mandatory…)

  3. 3.

    Consistency assurance among variants by means of restriction models.

  4. 4.

    Usability support to the variation mechanisms.

  5. 5.

    Documentation and reuse of knowledge.

1.1 Requirements for process model element variation support

According to Fuggetta (2000), software process models are composed of several elements, and in order to model variations in software processes, the first set of requirements is to define which of their elements acquire the capability to vary. Table 8 lists the requirements associated with the software process elements.

Table 8 List of requirements for the goal of defining concepts to model variability parts in process models
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1.2 Requirements for types of supported variation

Once the elements that need to vary in a software process are determined, it is necessary to determine how they could vary. In other words, with regard to the software process, we need to know that the behavior of these elements when they vary to tailor the process, meets the specific characteristics of the project, the product, or the organization. Table 9 summarizes the requirements for modeling this behavior.

Table 9 List of requirements for defining rules to model the way variability occurs in process models
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1.3 Consistency assurance among variants by means of restriction models

The behavior of the elements that vary in a process model must be controlled in order to prevent inconsistencies between the tailored processes. This being so, another set of requirements fits this need for consistency assurance in several ways, by relating elements, and, based on this, by modeling constraints. Table 10 includes all the requirements associated with this category.

Table 10 List of requirements for defining rules to model the way variability occurs in process models
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1.4 Requirements for usability support to the variation mechanisms

Process variability is based on the idea of someone deciding all the variabilities of a variant-rich process model and generating a tailor process model that fits a specific requirement. In order to do this, another set of requirements of a process notation must be designed in an effort to make the tailoring task easier. Table 11 includes all the requirements for supporting easy variant-rich process tailoring.

Table 11 List of requirements for defining concepts to abstract the user from variability details
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1.5 Requirements for documentation and reuse of knowledge

Tailoring also involves converting characteristics in the context of the process into correct variations; in the variant-rich process, it is important not to start from scratch. Documenting process variations allows reuse of knowledge, which makes deciding process variability an important point. The requirements fitting this category are listed in Table 12.

Table 12 List of requirements for defining concepts to allow variability documentation
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Appendix 2: Complete list of articles

Table 13 includes all the studies analyzed in this systematic review. It also identifies the type of study according to the classification presented in the “Inclusion and Exclusion criteria” section.

Table 13 Complete list of primary studies
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Appendix 3: Excerpts of tables for extraction of information

This appendix presents extracts from the information tables used to organize information during the systematic review. Figures 12 and 13 present an overview of the description and the first information tables, respectively. The other information tables are quite similar to that shown in Fig. 13.

Fig. 12
figure 12

Overview of the description table

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Fig. 13
figure 13

Overview of the first information table

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Martínez-Ruiz, T., Münch, J., García, F. et al. Requirements and constructors for tailoring software processes: a systematic literature review. Software Qual J 20, 229–260 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-011-9147-6

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