A Workshop-Oriented Approach for Defining Electronic Process Guides. A Case Study

We introduce electronic process guides, and discuss their role in software engineering projects. We then present existing methods for constructing electronic process guides by defining a set of common processes for a company. Different approaches from the software engineering and management science are presented. We then go on to propose a new way of dealing with process description in software engineering: using process workshops as a tool to reach consensus on work practice. The main reason for this is to get realistic descriptions with accurate detail as well as company commitment in an efficient manner. We describe our workshop-oriented method to define processes, which we have used in small software companies, and show examples of results. Key words: Electronic process guide; process workshop; process model; software process improvement