Semantically Valid Integration of Development Processes and Toolchains

Abstract

As an indispensable component of today’s world economy and an increasing success factor in production and other processes, as well as products, software needs to handle a growing number of specific requirements and influencing factors that are driven by globalization. Two common success factors in the domain of Software Systems Engineering are standardized software development processes and process-supported toolchains. Development processes should be formally integrated with toolchains. The sequence and the results of toolchains must also be validated with the specifications of the development process on several levels. The outcome of a conceptual deductive analysis is that there is neither a formal general mapping nor a generally accepted validation mechanism for the challenges that such an integrated concept faces. To close this research gap, this paper focuses on the core issue of the integration of development processes and toolchains in order to create benefits for modeling and automatization in the domain of systems engineering. Therefore, it describes a self-developed integration approach related to the recently introduced prototypical technical implementation TOPWATER. A unified metamodel specifies how processes and toolchains are linked by a general mapping mechanism that considers test options for the structural, content, and semantic levels.