Abstract

As part of their effort to reduce development time and improve the quality of their products, software developers are looking at the software development process they use. They reason that a high quality process is likely to lead to a high quality product. However, few developers receive high ratings on the accepted scales when their process is evaluated. To achieve the highest ratings for their processes, developers need to measure and manage their process and to do this effectively, they need tool support. However, they also have significant investments in their existing processes and support systems that they cannot afford to abandon. This makes adopting the process model that is implicit in most process support tools difficult. In this paper, we describe our tool, RolEnact that attempts to address the requirements for a tool for the simulation and evaluation of software development processes and illustrate its use with an example.

Author Keywords: Process modelling; RolEnact; Simulation; Software development process

Article Outline

1. Introduction

2. Requirements for an evaluation tool

3. Motivation

4. Description of RolEnact

4.1. The RolEnact model generator

4.2. The RolEnact Stepper

4.3. The RolEnact Simulator

5. An example process modelled using RolEnact

6. Conclusion

References

Vitae