From Design to Tools : Process Modeling and Enactment with PDE and PET

In our research group we work on software development process modeling and particularly deal with the question how a defined development process can be brought to life in a project. Modeling of complex processes with hundreds of elements requires comprehensive tool support. Successful enactment of a process during project lifetime does depend on how well the process is supported by tools for project execution – among equally important factors that deal with psychological and organizational questions. To prove ideas developed in research and to ease our day-to-day work in industrial cooperations, we are developing many tools ourselves. In this paper, we present the Process Development Environment and the Process Enactment Tool Framework that support intuitive modeling of development processes and their enactment. We give an overview over the organization and the process of our tool development, challenges we are facing, and present the lessons learned from academic tool development both from the researchers’ and the students’ point of view.