Software Process: Principles

1 Jean Claude Derniame Software process technology is an emerging and strategic area that has already reached a reasonable degree of maturity, delivering products and significant industrial expe riences. This technology aims at supporting the software production process by pro viding the means to model, analyse, improve, measure, and whenever it is reasonable and convenient, to automate software production activities. In recent years, this tech nology has proved to be effective in the support of many business activities not directly related to software production, but relying heavily on the concept of process (i. e. all the applications traditionally associated with workflow management). This book concentrates on the core technology of software processes, its principles and concepts as well as the technical aspect of software process support. The contributions to this book are the collective work of the Promoter 2 European Working Group. This grouping of 13 academic and 3 industrial partners is the suc cessor of Promoter, a working group responsible for creating a European software process community. Promoter 2 aims at exploiting this emerging community to collec tively develop remaining open issues, to coordinate activities and to assist in the dis semination of results. The title "Software Process Modelling and Technology" [Fink94] was produced during Promoter 1. Being "project based", it presented the main findings and proposals of the different projects then being undertaken by the partners.