Measurement-based software process modeling

Software process modeling has been recognized as an important topic since the early days of software engineering. Process modeling language plays a crucial role when it is used to define and analyze the processes. Complex processes have many elements and there are many potential ways to improve them. Without a quantitative understanding of the process steps, it is difficult to tell which ones are effective. Processes can be measured for size, effort, schedule and cost under successful performance. A process should be defined based on organization's intents or business goals. Although current studies on software process improvement have aroused interest of many researchers in this field, software development strategies do not provide a clear indication for constituents of software processes. Under this circumstance, an approach based on Unified Modeling Language (UML) was proposed in the present study to define a software process as an effective way for identifying and defining the essential process elements of good evaluating practice. The study aimed to embed quantitative evaluation faculty into project's process definition stage and satisfy the goal of organization process improvement. The proposed approach focused on the study of UML static models as class diagrams complemented with a set of Object Constraint Language (OCL) constraints. © 2011 Academic Jourmals Inc.