Implementing and validating SynchSPEM: A solution for synchronizing activities and products within a software engineering process

Activities and products are among the key concepts defining and participating to the life cycle of software engineering processes. These two concepts are bonded by strong relationships of production and consumption, which implies that their evolution should be monitored to ensure their consistency and coherence, this monitoring is referred to as synchronization between products and activities. In this paper, we present and validate a solution to the synchronization problem through a SPEM based metamodel: SynchSPEM. This metamodel describes software development processes, especially product and activity entities, and their relationships by managing synchronization between them. To ensure the execution of the produced models, a behavioral model has been defined for SynchSPEM. Thus, the metamodel will establish the structure of the process, while the behavioral model will define its dynamic aspect. The Kermeta metamodeling language has been used to implement the SynchSPEM solution, and a case study has been performed in order to validate this solution.