Maintaining a Large Process Model Aligned with a Process Standard: An Industrial Example

An essential characteristic of mature software and system development organizations is the definition and use of explicit process models. For a number of reasons, it can be valuable to produce new process models by tailoring existing process standards (such as the V-Modell XT). Both process models and standards evolve over time in order to integrate improvements or adapt the process models to context changes. An important challenge for a process engineering team is to keep tailored process models aligned over time with the standards originally used to produce them. This article presents an approach that supports the alignment of process standards evolving in parallel to derived process models, using an actual industrial example to illustrate the problems and potential solutions. We present and discuss the results of a quantitative analysis done to determine whether a strongly tailored model can still be aligned with its parent standard and to assess the potential cost of such an alignment. We close the paper with conclusions and outlook.