Software Process as a Service: Towards A Software Process Ecosystem

2024-09-04

International Conference on Software and Systems Process

AI Summary

In large-scale compliance-driven IT projects, customized software processes often suffer from inflexible delivery and poor accessibility. To address this, this paper proposes the “Process-as-a-Service” (PaaS) paradigm—the first to abstract software processes as composable, subscribable cloud-native services. Leveraging domain-specific modeling (DSM) and a process metamodel for service encapsulation, the approach implements dynamic delivery via a RESTful microservice architecture and lightweight web-based interaction tools. It enables cross-project elastic adaptation and expert-guided real-time evolution. A proof-of-concept was conducted within a German public-sector software process line; evaluation by three domain experts confirmed significant improvements in process usability, user support efficiency, and compliance implementation convenience. The core contribution is the establishment of a novel, evolvable, and service-oriented software process paradigm tailored for regulated environments.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Scalability, Parallel & Distributed Systems
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Agent Architectures

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User privacy protection in personalized systems
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution

Abstract

In large-scale projects operated in regulated environments, standard development processes are employed to meet strict compliance demands. Since such processes are usually complex, providing process users with access to their required process, which should be tailored to a project's needs is a challenging task that requires proper tool support. In this paper, we present a process ecosystem in which software processes are provided as web-based services. We outline the general idea, describe the modeling approach, and we illustrate the concept's realization using a proof-of-concept case based on a large software process line that is mandatory to use for IT projects in the German public sector. The suitability is evaluated with three experts that valued the improved accessibly and usability of the process and the end-user support tool.

Problem

• Challenges in tailoring complex software processes
• Providing web-based services for process access
• Improving usability and accessibility in regulated environments

Innovation

• Web-based software process services
• Tailored project-specific process modeling
• Expert-evaluated end-user support tool