SynchroState: A SPEM-based Solution for Synchronizing Activities and Products through State Transitions

Software engineering research was always focused around the efficiency of software development processes. Recently, we noticed an increasing interest in model-driven approaches in this context. Models that were once merely descriptive, are nowadays playing a productive role in defining engineering processes and managing their lifecycles. However, there is a problem that has not been considered enough; it is about sustaining consistency between products and the implicated activities during the process lifecycle. This issue, identified in this paper as the synchronization problem, needs to be resolved in order to guarantee a flawless execution of a software process. In this paper, we present a SPEM-based solution named SynchroState that highlights the relationship between process activities and products. SynchroState's goal is to ensure synchronization between activities and products in order that if one of these two entities undergoes a change, the dependents entities should be notified and evolved to sustain consistency In order to evaluate SynchroState, we have implemented the solution using the AspectJ language and validated it through a case study inspired from the ISPW-6 software process example. Results of this study demonstrate the automation of synchronization of product state following a change in the activity state during the evolution of the process execution.