Software Process as a Service: Towards A Software Process Ecosystem

TL;DR

This paper proposes a web-based process ecosystem for large-scale, regulated software projects, enhancing access, usability, and support for complex, tailored development processes in compliance-heavy environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel process ecosystem model providing software processes as web services, with a proof-of-concept implementation for public sector IT projects.

Findings

Improved accessibility and usability of software processes.

Positive expert evaluation of the ecosystem's support tools.

Demonstrated feasibility in a large public sector project.

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.