Software process description using LOTOS and its enaction

Software processes can be treated as cooperative works among several engineers. In order to enact a software process in a distributed environment, the engineers must communicate with each other for exchanging data values and synchronization messages. Such communications should be described in a process description for enacting the process automatically and clarifying the engineers´ work. Since these communications are numerous, it is troublesome for the process designers to describe them minutely in the process description. They also make the description unreadable. We propose a formal software process model where we describe only a whole description of a process in which we describe only the contents and temporal orders of primitive activities, and do not specify the communications. From the whole description, we derive each engineer´s individual description, automatically where the contents and orders of his activities and communications to others are described. A whole process is enacted by executing all individual descriptions in parallel. Both whole and individual descriptions are described in LOTOS/SPD, an extension of the formal specification language LOTOS. We have also developed a support system for deriving the individual descriptions and executing them on UNIX machines