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. Processes in businesses and other organisations are not set in concrete. They have to be flexible and responsive to stimuli which cause them to change. Process technology must relect these characteristics if it is to find realistic application. This paper illustrates how the evolutionary nature of processes may be supported in a particular process technology, that originally developed in the IPSE 2.5 project. 1 Introduction The traditional view of software development is that it is a process starting with the establishment of requirements, moving through phases such as design and implementation and finishing in something called "maintenance". Of course, we all know that reality is rather different with the process being rather more cyclic in nature, phases overlapping one another and so on. Process technology must not be restricted to the simple view if it is to find credible application. Change and concurrency are essential elements of this and many other application domains. Such ...

Large software systems have a large number of components and are developed over a long time period frequently by a large number of people. We describe a framework approach to evolving such systems based on an integration of product and process modelling. The evolving system is represented as a Product Tower, a hierarchy of components which provides views of the product at multiple levels of refinement. The evolution process is component based with the cooperation between components being mediated by the Product Tower. This ensures that the evolution process is scaleable and that it maintains, and evolves, the design model. We illustrate our approach with an example, outlining an evolution both of the product and of the process. The reflexive facilities of the process are shown to be key in ensuring the framework's ability to evolve. Keywords: product evolution, process evolution, process modelling, design hierarchy 1 Introduction Modern large software systems are systems which: ffl ...

This paper describes how a persistent language, PS-algol, was exploited to implement a process support system. The concepts of persistence are explained, together with other attributes of PS-algol which add value to it. These include first class procedures, the ability for a PS-algol program to change itself by means of the callable compiler, and the universal pointer type which permits flexible binding. The process support system PSS supports the enactment of process models by executing process programs written in the language PML. The central feature of PML is the role. This is an object which communicates with other roles via interactions, or messages. The central component of PSS is a process control engine which supports the compilation and execution of programs written in PML. Roles are persistent processes and are represented as (first class) PS-algol procedures. Interactions are persistent messages which are held in the working data of a persistent scheduler. The PML of a role ...

Introduction In May,1993,industry and academic representatives from IRUS member institutions met to conduct a unique technical research review on the topic of software environments. This group was charged with the goal of assessing the state of the art and state of the practice in software developmentenvironments with an eyetowards formulating a research and technology transfer agenda for the deployment of effectivesoftware environments. The participants started with the premise that few environments are in actual use, and that there is little agreementonwhich principles should guide the development of a successful environment. Fundamental to this meeting was the reservoir of knowledge held by all participants, and the desire to see this knowledge consolidated and applied to takesoftware environments from the state of the practice, namely infrequently used point solutions, to the desired goal of invaluable, effective, integrated tool sets. This document describes the issues en

The Vienna Development Method is a formal language developed at the IBM laboratories in Vienna. First we give a short overview of the history of VDM from programming language description to VDM++. The language and its syntax are described in the following. Since the invention of VDM lots of tools have been developed. One of them is mural, a proof framework for VDM. We explain the basic features of mural and give a short example proof. The most important tool for VDM today is VDMTools which is still beeing developed. We give an overview of VDMTools features and present a detailed example of a VDM++ model in VDMTools. The example includes Java code generation from VDM.