Know How and Know What for Software Processes

Formal specification of a software process, as well as its optimal design, is a fundamental landmark and tenet that any successful software company must follow. Recent trends can be characterized as a knowledge-base support of the software-process development, standardization and improvement. To this end we create semantic annotations (ontologies) of processes which should serve as a stable unifying core of the software-process development. However, when doing so, we meet the problem how to transform various forms of tacit, implicit knowledge into an explicit knowledge specification that is logically tractable and machine readable. In this paper we focus on the transformation of informal tacit knowledge about a software process (or any part of the process) to the formal knowledge specification that can be used for building machine readable knowledge bases. In particular, we aim at optimizing and improving software-process development using knowledge bases which are created to the purpose of a formal description of the software-process development.