Grupo Alarcos · Conference paper · 2011

Managing Process Diversity by Applying Rationale Management in Variant Rich Processes

Tomás Martínez Ruiz, Félix Óscar García Rubio, Mario Piattini Velthuis

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2011) · 2011 · 9 citations (OpenAlex)

Process diversity arises as software processes are influenced by organization, project and other contextual factors. Managing this diversity consists of considering how these factors actually modify the process. Variant rich processes offer support for process tailoring, but they do not currently link these changes with the business factors motivating them. The lack of decision traceability signifies that variant rich processes are not suitable for addressing process diversity. This article aims to fill this gap by applying rationale management to supporting decision-making when tailoring processes. Rationale management has become one of the main assets in variant rich process tailoring, since it handles how context-related factors are transformed into real variations in the tailoring process, as a consequence of well-reasoned and traceable steps. An application study shows how rationale provides useful mechanisms with which to tailor a process according to its context of enactment.