Representations of activities dealing with the development or maintenance of software are called software process models. Process models allow for communication, reasoning, guidance, improvement, and automation. Two approaches for building, instantiating, and managing processes, namely CoMo-Kit and MVP-E, are combined to build a more powerful one. CoMo-Kit is based on AI/KE technology; it was developed for supporting complex design processes and is not specialized to software development processes. MVP-E is a process-sensitive software engineering environment for modeling and analyzing software development processes, and guides software developers. Additionally, it provides services to establish and run measurement programmes in software organizations. Because both approaches were developed completely independently major integration efforts are to be made to combine their both advantages. This paper concentrates on the resulting language concepts and their operationalization necessary for building automated process support.
Experience gathered from applying the software process modeling language MVP-L in software development organizations has shown the need for graphical representations of process models. Project members (i.e„ non MVP-L specialists) review models much more easily by using graphical representations. Although several various graphical notations were developed for individual projects in which MVP-L was applied, there was previously no consistent definition of a mapping between textual MVP-L models and graphical representations. This report defines a graphical representation schema for MVP-L
descriptions and combines previous results in a unified form. A basic set of building blocks (i.e., graphical symbols and text fragments) is defined, but because we must first gain experience with the new symbols, only rudimentary guidelines are given for composing basic
symbols into a graphical representation of a model.