Tools for software process engineering

• Published in: Bell Labs technical journal Vol. 2; no. 1; pp. 130 - 143
• Main Authors: Brownlie, Robert A., Brown, Philip E., Culver-Lozo, Kathleen, Striegel, James J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 1997; Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company
• ISSN: 1089-7089; 1538-7305
• DOI: 10.1002/bltj.2037

Lucent Technologies serves a large variety of telecommunications markets and customer needs. Success in such a rapidly changing environment requires that we quickly and effectively identify market needs and marshal our resources to address them. Clearly, a company that better coordinates and focuses its resources to serve customer needs will enjoy a competitive advantage. Because software development processes provide an important mechanism to coordinate project teams and ensure the customer-perceived value of the delivered product, we must be able to develop, deploy, and evolve those processes rapidly in step with the changing environment. Our experiences with software process engineering initiatives for Lucent projects have shown that such rapid process iteration is possible if an organization has a solid process engineering infrastructure. To provide such an infrastructure, the Software Technology Center has developed a set of process engineering tools to support the rapid development, deployment, and improvement of software processes. The platform is based on a centralized database organized around a relational model of key process concepts. Process engineers create instances of this database and automatically generate different views of their process. The process views are deployed to the members of the project through the Internet and the World Wide Web.