Adapting Case Management Techniques to Achieve Software Process Flexibility

Software processes have to be flexible in order to handle a wide range of software project types and complexities. Large companies that depend on custom-built software may therefore define different software processes in order to adapt to different recurring project contexts (e.g., hot-fix versus migration projects). However, the stakeholders do not always follow the intended “happy path”—not the least because any software project typically has to deal with a considerable amount of uncertainty. Following an agile process may not be possible due to a company’s culture or policy restrictions (e.g., in the healthcare or financial domain) though. In this chapter, we present an approach to introduce more flexibility into software process models by adapting case management techniques to the domain of flexible software process management, in order to cope with key issues that come with software process evolution. Key functionalities of the approach have been implemented in a prototype and showcased to developers and architects via a live experiment. The feedback is promising as it shows that the approach helps to quickly identify context-specific actions and artifacts. This in turn reduces effort in structuring the daily work of software process stakeholders in an environment of evolving process elements specific to different kinds of projects, roles, and technologies.