Acquiring experiences with the modelling and implementation of the project-life-cycle process: the PMDB work

Formalising and automating the software life-cycle processes are key factors in the improvement of software productivity. The authors describe the Project Master Database (PMDB) work, three generations of investigations into the modelling and encoding of software life-cycle processes; They briefly describe past activities and concentrate on more recent investigations. They present an approach to software process modelling based on an object-based model called the PMDB+model, which includes project elements, relationships between these elements and behavioural descriptions of project life-cycle activities. An overview of the model is presented, together with examples to illustrate the application of the model to existing software processes. The authors also describe a prototyping exercise that implemented the PMDB+model in an object-oriented database management system. Key results of these investigations, the impact of process implementations on the architecture of environments, and lessons learnt from the exercises are described