Software development as a workflow process

It is a general consensus that automated support for software development is essential to harness the ever increasing complexity of today's software. Many software development models, tools, and environments have been introduced to address such a need; however they are usually methodology-specific and impose a rather authoritarian policy on the way software is developed. This paper advocates the use of workflow systems to enact the process of software development. Besides being more general and flexible, the workflow paradigm supports useful features lacking in other approaches. Also, it helps to reduce development complexity by allowing both the software development process and the software themselves to be captured using the very same paradigm. This paper introduces a workflow system being developed to support the software development process by presenting a solution to the ISPW-6 Software Process Example expressed in its specification language. This paper therefore serves two purposes: (1) to introduce a new and more general approach to software process enactment and (2) to identify new requirements for the workflow paradigm, such as event dependency, that are applicable to many other advanced applications.