A Formal Adaptation Method For Process Descriptions

Requirement to describing software development processes in formal manners has been increased, and demand for altering and tailoring the process descriptions has been emerged. In this paper, we propose a functional language PDL (Process Description Language), designed to describe various development processes under a certain environment. To create and modify the PDL scripts easily and correctly, we propose a method of stepwise refinement from abstract scripts into concrete scripts. By this method, the abstract definitions of software process flow and product flow initially given as function definitions irk PDL, are transformed into the concrete definitions of the tool activations, message displays, and so on. We also discuss an architecture design of a software development environment (Adaptable Software Development Environment), which can be adapted in many ways for designer's requirements.