A process modelling framework: capturing key aspects of organisational behaviour

The organisation management and social science literature are rich in descriptions of models relevant to the software development process. However, even the most prescriptive of these models are not specified with any great degree of formality. Nevertheless, key aspects of these models can be represented using more formal modelling approaches. This, in turn, allows the definition and development of evaluation environments that allow the rapid prototyping of persistent process models which effectively embody technical, organisational, social and human factors. A software engineering process modelling framework is presented. The focus of the work is on behavioural aspects. A feature of the framework is that user views, in a variety of modelling formalisms, may be extracted from a common, highly abstracted conceptual model. Examples of “user views” represented and implemented in Prolog and a systems dynamics modelling tool are presented