Paper Info
Title
Modelling Software Process Variability: An Empirical Study
Abstract
Variability in software process models justifies tailoring them to meet the specific goals and characteristics of organisations and projects. Existing process modelling notations typically do not have constructs which are appropriate for expressing process variability. To fill this gap, the authors have extended software process engineering metamodel (SPEM) to vSPEM, by adding new variability constructs (such as variants and variation points). This article presents an empirical validation to check whether the variability constructs supported through vSPEM are more appropriate for modelling variant-rich processes than SPEM, in terms of understandability of the notation, as well as of their variability mechanisms. The results indicate that the vSPEM variability mechanisms understandability is a 126.99% higher than for SPEM. On the other hand, process diagram understandability is a 34.87% lower with vSPEM than with SPEM. If we compare the relative results obtained with regard to understandability of diagrams and understandability of variation mechanisms of both vSPEM and SPEM, the enhancement just mentioned is 3.64 times that fall. The results indicate accepting that a slight decrease in understandability of the diagrams might lead to a large increase in understandability when using variability mechanisms of vSPEM.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1049/iet-sen.2010.0020
IET SOFTWARE
Keywords
Field
DocType
formal verification,process modelling,model checking
Notation,Model checking,Systems engineering,Computer science,Process modeling,Process flow diagram,Software development process,Empirical research,Metamodeling,Formal verification
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
5
2
1751-8806
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.70
11
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Tomás Martinez-Ruiz1635.32
Felix Garcia234225.00
Mario Piattini34232354.63
Jürgen Münch41286147.27