ENGINEERING SOFTWARE-DESIGN PROCESSES TO GUIDE PROCESS EXECUTION

Using systematic development processes is an important characteristic of any mature engineering discipline. In current software practice, So ftware Design Methodologies (SDMs) are intended to be used to help des ign software more systematically. This paper shows, however, that one well-known example of such an SDM, Booch Object-Oriented Design (BOOD) , as described in the literature is too imprecise and incomplete to be considered as a fully systematic process for specific projects. To pr ovide more effective and appropriate guidance and control in software design processes, we applied the process programming concept to the de sign process. Given two different sets of plausible design process req uirements, we elaborated two more detailed and precise design processe s that are responsive to these requirements. We have also implemented, experimented with, and evaluated a prototype (called Debus-Booch) tha t supports the execution of these detailed processes.