A method to build information systems engineering process metamodels

Charlotte Hug, Agnès Front, Dominique Rieu, Brian Henderson-Sellers
2009 Journal of Systems and Software  
To cite this version: Charlotte Hug, Agnès Front, Dominique Rieu, Brian Henderson-Sellers. A method to build information systems engineering process metamodels. Journal of Systems and Software, ElsevierAbstract: Several process metamodels exist. Each of them presents a different viewpoint of the same information systems engineering process. However, there are no existing correspondences between them. We propose a method to build unified, fitted and multi-viewpoint process metamodels for
more » ... ion systems engineering. Our method is based on a process domain metamodel that contains the main concepts of information systems engineering process field. This process domain metamodel helps selecting the needed metamodel concepts for a particular situational context. Our method is also based on patterns to refine the process metamodel. The process metamodel can then be instantiated according to the organisation's needs. The resulting method is represented as a pattern system. 6 SMSDM, SPEM, OOSPICE, OPF and LiveNet. Table 1 includes two activity oriented process metamodels, SPEM and OPF, but also product oriented process metamodels, decision, context and strategy oriented process metamodels.] It can be seen that some concepts are common to various process metamodels, for example WorkDefinition, but these are frequently not at the same granularity level, e.g. WorkDefinition and WorkUnit are very general terms whereas Step and Action are very concrete. Almost all the process metamodels deal with the concept of Product, but only the State-Transition metamodel (and all the product-oriented process metamodels) focuses on States. In contrast, the concepts of Issue, Alternative and Argument are only defined in decision-oriented process metamodels. Some concepts, such as Precondition and Goal, seem very similar to Situation and Intention or Source Intention and Target Intention as they all correspond to the state of the process before or after an action, respectively; although they would appear to be located at different levels of abstraction. Pre-condition and Goal (a.k.a. Postcondition) are concrete, while Situation and Intention are more abstract. The concept of Context is only present in the context-oriented process metamodel NATURE and the concept of Strategy only exists in the strategy-oriented process metamodel. dx.
doi:10.1016/j.jss.2009.05.020 fatcat:5ik3fwp6y5g7rgs4rxxxyjoxx4