A meta-process model for the planned development of integrated systems

Maturity of technologies from one side and customers' demands from the other side have led to the need to develop increasingly large and complex systems. The problem we face is to structure the development of these types of systems and the systems themselves in a useful way and to support the development process from its conceptual foundation to its tool aspect.We believe that we must take one step beyond the current software engineering methodology to be able to cope with this task. What we propose is a framework, a meta-process model, that allows one to develop in a flexible but integrated manner a distributed, open, and integrated system with a planned approach. Based on the premise that the main factor is to build a common culture of understanding and conceptual thinking in an application domain, we suggest an additional level of coordination and modeling above the various development projects. In analyzing this two-leveled process model, we identify the major processes and models involved. While we focus on the process model itself, we discuss also in some more depth the two major concepts of domain analysis and integration architecture design as they relate to our approach. A strategy for realizing the meta-process model based on the notion of Application Machines is described.