Brokering Process Components

Software is growing exponentially in complexity, cost, and size, however, the resulting software quality is declining dramatically while software development cycles continue to increase. Current approaches commonly used to address these issues are software process and automated workflows. Each realization of these concepts results in unique automated process support tools. These tools all use their own software process modeling techniques based upon their specific software meta-model. Each tool generates software process definitions that are non-composable, non-reusable, and non-interoperable. Further improvements in software development and software quality requires an approach that supports search, dynamic composition, reuse, and interoperability among these diverse software process definitions. Brokering process components provides the framework and infrastructure necessary to achieve search, dynamic composition, reuse, and interoperability among heterogeneous software process definitions. The Process Component Broker Framework accomplishes this brokering process components approach. The framework consists of three main elements: the Process Broker, the Process Component Characteristics and Controls, and Process Components. The core of the framework is the Process Broker, which provides the infrastructure and services necessary to search, dynamically compose and reuse Process Components. The process component characteristics and access controls must be exposed to the Process Broker as specified by the Process Component Characteristics and Controls. These Process Components are abstract encapsulators of the software process definitions, which are defined based on Open Process Components definition for Domain Layer process components, as well as, the common software component attributes. This dissertation presents a framework and infrastructure for brokering process components. In addition, this thesis successfully demonstrates the feasibility of this approach by implementing a simple prototype of the Process Component Broker Framework. The approach presented in this dissertation has the benefit of allowing organizations to reuse and share legacy and new software process definitions, regardless of the automated process support tools that are used to create or the location of the software process definitions. Therefore, organizations that deploy this approach can more effectively utilize software process and automated workflows to improve software development, which means shortening the development cycle time, improving software quality, and reducing development costs.