The Process Enactment Tool Framework—Transformation of software process models to prepare enactment

Rich development process models contain information about structures for project organization and also for concrete outcomes of a project. However, rich processes are hard to implement. They often contain hundreds of pages of documentation. Development teams tend to be skeptical about rich processes in fear of additional effort, risking the benefits of rich tool support for enactment. Process enactment is a challenging task. There is no common methodology to quickly “implement” a development process in a tool or a set of tools. Often specialized tools are used to provide assistance during the project and it is the project manager’s task to consolidate the information with the rest of the team.The Process Enactment Tool Framework (PET) is a software tool that supports the transformation of a given formal development process into a format that project tools can work with. PET is an instrument to import processes based on a metamodel and provide exports for a specific project environment. PET takes an input software development process model and transforms it into an intermediate format that serves as the basis for a second transformation step into data formats of tools such as office suites or comprehensive ALM platforms. In this paper we present the tool framework and show how metamodel-based processes can be transformed into an environment that is ready to use for a project team. We show how PET is applied for the German V-Modell XT and for SPEM-based processes to generate, e.g., process templates for the Team Foundation Server or work product document templates.