A typed generic process model for product focused process improvement

The motivation behind the idea of product focused process improvement is to make a process improvement program address certain product quality features in an explicit manner. The PROFES methodology (http://www.profes.org) describes such an improvement program through the notion of a PPD (Product-Process Dependency) repository. The typed generic process model (TGPM) (Satpathy et al., 2000) is a parametric template which relates each process attribute with the way it is likely to affect the quality of the intermediate as well as the end products. TGPM could be instantiated to generate process models for individual processes. This paper shows how the TGPM and the PROFES methodology both address product quality in a similar manner and how they could be complementary to each other as regards to product focused process improvement.