Acquiring experiences with the modelling and implementation of the project life-cycle process: the PMDB work

Abstract

Formalising and automating the software life-cycle processes are key factors in the improvement of software productivity. This paper describes the Project Master Database (PMDB) work, three generations of investigations into the modelling and encoding of software life-cycle processes; it briefly describes past activities and concentrates on more recent investigations. It presents an approach to software process modelling based on an object-based model called the PMDB+ model, which includes project elements, relationships between those elements and behavioural descriptions of project life-cycle activities. An overview of the model is presented, together with examples to illustrate the application of the model to existing software processes. It also describes a prototyping exercise that implemented the PMDB+ model in an object-oriented database management system. Key results of these investigations, the impact of process implementations on the architecture of environments, and lessons learnt from the exercises are described.