Thirteenth Lecture Hour8:30 – 9:20 am, Sunday,

September 16

Software Management Disciplines

Process Automation(from Part III, Chapter 12 of Royce’ book)

Review –The Four Parts of the Course

• Software Management Renaissance

– The conventional software management process.

– Five improvements to make the waterfall process work.

• A Software Management Process Framework

– Phases

– Artifacts

– Workflows

– Checkpoints

• Software Management Disciplines– Planning– Organization– Automation– Process control and

instrumentation– Tailoring

• Looking Ahead– Modern project profiles– Next-generation software

economics– Modern process transitions

Topics for Today

• Automation building blocks

• The project environment– Round-trip engineering– Change management– Infrastructures– Stakeholder environments

Levels of Automation

• Meta-process– Organization’s policies, procedures, and practices for the

line of business– Inventory of preferred tools, artifact templates, guidelines,

project repositories, skill sets, library.

• Macro-process– Project’s policies, procedures, practices, project

environment and collection of tools to produce artifacts.

• Micro-process– Project team’s policies, etc., for achieving an artifact.

Tools.

Automation and Tools

Workflow Tools

• Management– Project planning and control,

on-line status assessments.

• Environment– Configuration management

and change control

• Requirements– Integrate documents and

visual representations for specifications and use cases.

• Design– Visual modeling

• Implementation– Integration of programming

environment with change management tools, visual modeling tools, and test automation tools.

• Assessment and deployment– Test automation, test

management, and defect tracking tools.

The Three Project Environments

• The Prototype Environment– Architecture testbed

• Performance trade-offs

• Technical risk analysis

• Make/buy tradeoffs

• Fault tolerance trades

• Transitioning risks

• Test scenarios

• The Development Environment– Development tools– Round-trip engineering

tools

• The Maintenance Environment– Mature version of the

development environment

Four Important Environment Disciplines

• Integration of tools to support round-trip engineering for iterative development.

• Change management automation to manage multiple iterations AND change freedom.

• Infrastructure to enable environments derived from a common base.– Promotes inter-project consistency, reuse of training, and

reuse of lessons learned.

• Stakeholder environment extensions– Provides cost savings for information exchange and

approvals for engineering artifacts.

Round-trip Engineering

• Primary reason: allow freedom in changing software engineering data sources.

• New needs for automation:– Heterogeneous components, platforms,

languages, complexity of building, controlling and maintaining large-scale webs of components.

Round-trip Engineering

Change Management

• Change management is more critical in modern processes.– Artifacts are begun early, use rigor, and evolve

over time.

• Software Change Orders (SCO) are used to create, modify, or obsolesce components.

• Change Orders are used to track status and performance.

Software Change Order

Configuration Control

• Configuration Control Board– Manages releases– Makes change decisions

• Membership– Software manager(s), system engineer (sometimes),

key software architect (sometimes), customer representatives.

• General comment– It’s never dull! Can be the most fun and exciting

software management job of all.

Release History

Representative Changes

Infrastructure

• Organizational Policy– Process definition – major

milestones, intermediate artifacts, engineering repositories, metrics, roles and responsibilities.

– What gets done, when does it get done, who does it, how do we know that it is adequate (checkpoints, metrics and standards of performance.

• Three Levels– Highest: long-term process

improvement, general technology, education, mandatory quality control.

– Intermediate: domain-specific technology, reuse of components, processes, training, tools, and personnel.

– Lowest: efficiency items, project-specific training, compliance with customer requirements and business unit standards.

Organization Environment

• Provides answers as to how things get done.• Provide tools and techniques to automate the

process.– Standardized tool selections.– Standard notations for artifacts.– Tool adjuncts such as artifact templates (architecture

description, evaluation criteria, release descriptions, status assessments

– Activity templates (iteration planning, major milestones, configuration control boards.

Organization Environment (cont’d)

• Additional components– Reference library for planning, etc.– Existing case studies– Project artifacts library– Audit and compliance traceability frameworks.

Stakeholder Environment

• Stakeholders will participate.• Participation should be constructive and

value-added to the development.• On-line extension to stakeholder

environment enables hands-on evaluations, use of same tools to manage and monitor the project, and minimizes customer travel and paper exchanges.

Extension to Stakeholder Domain

Extension Issues

• How much access freedom is supported?• Who pays for the environment and tool

investments.• How secure is the information exchange.• How is change management synchronized.• How to avoid abuse by customer.• How to avoid disruption to the

development.

Assignment for Next Class Meeting

• Read Chapter 12 of Royce’ book, on process automation.– Learn and discuss the types of automation tools which

should be used.

– Learn and discuss the elements of organization policy.

– Learn and discuss the elements of organization environment.

– Learn and discuss the pros and cons of extension to the stakeholder environment.