Creating Process-Agents incrementally by mining process asset library

Software process trustworthiness is the degree of confidence that a software process produces expected trustworthy work products that satisfy requirements. Software processes are dynamic and highly people-dependent. The performance of software processes relies not only on the process itself, but also on the personnel’s capabilities. Therefore, management of human resources and evaluation of a company’s work force capabilities are crucial and will affect software process trustworthiness. Our software process modeling method OEC-SPM (Organization-Entity Capability based Software Process Modeling) has been shown to take into account personnel’s capabilities and groups software developers with certain capabilities into a Process-Agent, which is a way of organizing human resources and process asset libraries in software organizations, and will help to improve trustworthiness of software processes. This paper proposes a novel method for incrementally mining Process-Agents from process asset libraries to support OEC-SPM. The method can automatically and incrementally create Process-Agents under three scenarios with high efficiency. Furthermore, we assess the method with the data from real industry setting. The results show that the utilization of human resources in an organization can be optimized when personnel’s capabilities are taken into account. Additionally, reasonable resource scheduling making use of Process-Agents will result in higher trustworthiness.