Chapter 3. The Quality Process Architecture
The change from craftsmanship to industrialization does not come with the change to a new technique. The change must come on a more fundamental level which also includes the organization of the complete development process.
Putting This Chapter in Perspective
The previous chapter focused on creating the right environment, and eliciting management support for necessary quality-assurance activities and tasks. A crucial aspect of that quality environment is a quality process. In this chapter we discuss what constitutes such a process, and how it helps to enhance quality in a UML-based project. This chapter does not propose a new process, but discusses the most commonly used activities and tasks that should be present in all processes. These activities and tasks and their related roles and deliverables are described with the aim of improving the discipline in a process, resulting in the enhanced quality of UML-based deliverables and, eventually, the software product.
This chapter starts by mapping the three dimensions of a process (the what, how, and who as mentioned in Chapter 1) to the corresponding examples in UML-based projects. Unlike the UML metamodel, though, we do not yet have an officially standardized process metamodel. Therefore, to simplify our process discussion, we develop the mapping of the three dimensions of a process into an unofficial metamodel for processes. Various process-components are then derived from this metamodel. In identifying and describing the process-components, we consider the most basic or core elements of a process. Furthermore, we consider in greater detail the methodological or “how to” aspect of the process-components (their activities and tasks). Relevant deliverables (“what”) and roles (“who”) are also mentioned in the process-components. This is followed by descriptions of the necessity and sufficiency aspects of quality of the process-components. Malleability is part of process enactment and therefore not discussed separately for each process-component. Thus, this chapter deals with the construction of a process. Once a quality-conscious process is created, it is ready for deployment and enactment—topics dealt with in Chapter 4.