Process modelling is considered today as a key issue by both, the Software Engineering (SE) and the Information Systems Engineering (ISE) community. However, most recent process models are descriptions of software development activities written in an executable form that computer systems can enforce. There is a need for process models which take into account heuristic knowledge to guide humans performing systems development. We refer to such guidance centred process models as 'ways-of-working'. So far, most work has concentrated on developing and experimenting with process modelling approaches and little attention has been paid to the problem of developing a method for defining a new process model. We propose in this paper, an approach for defining ways-of-working in a systematic manner. It is a meta-modelling approach in which a given way-of-working is constructed by instantiation of a process meta-model allowing to deal with a large variety of situations in a flexible, decision-orien...

. The paper proposes a faceted framework to understand and classify issues in system development process engineering. The framework identifies four different but complementary view-points. Each view allows us to capture a particular aspect of process engineering. Inter-relationships between these aspects allow us to show the influence that one aspect has on another. In order to study, understand and classify a particular aspect of process engineering in its diversity we associate a set of facets with each aspect. The paper uses the framework to raise questions, problems and research issues in the field. 1. INTRODUCTION Process engineering is considered today as a key issue by both the software engineering and information systems engineering communities. Recent interest in process engineering is part of the shift of focus from the product to the process view of systems development. Process engineering is a rather new research area. Consequently there is no consensus on, for example, wh...

. Evolution is a fact of life in information systems. Not only systems evolve but also their development processes. IS environments must therefore be designed for accommodating and managing change. The management of process meta models in repositories is one important step; we show how process traceability models and process guidance models can be developed and related in a standard repository framework. In addition, the currently available tool integration along the presentation, data, and control perspectives have to be augmented for process integration. In our process-adaptable and interoperable tool concept, tool behavior is directly influenced by the process guidance model and automatically traced according to the traceability model. The approach is demonstrated with a prototype requirements engineering environment developed in ESPRIT project NATURE. 1 Information Systems and the Process Improvement Paradigm Information systems (IS) are networks of humans and information technolo...

this paper appears in the Special Issue on Requirements Engineering of the journal Techniques et Sciences Informatiques, Spring 1995. 2

Despite all the advantages discussed by the requirements engineering community about the appropriateness of object oriented paradigm and formal methods for requirements specification, their large scale use by industry is still a utopia. The reasons for that are the immaturity of the object oriented paradigm, and the lack of guidelines to undertake formalisation. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the core concepts of object orientation and the integration of object oriented semiformal and formal methods in the requirements specification activity of the requirements engineering process. This thesis describes Metamorphosis, a formal object oriented method for analysis and specification. First, the method describes a unifying object oriented model, whose components are those widely accepted and adopted by the main current object oriented methods. These are enriched with new features to address issues which have been neglected by the current methods. The method incorporates an object o...