Towards a computer-aided process engineering environment

This paper reports on issues in software process reuse and Computer-Aided Process Engineering (CAPE). The views described in this paper are a first outcome of the Process Reuse Study (PRS). PRS is an ongoing project involving four universities and one industrial partner that investigates opportunities of and approaches to process reuse.In this paper, is a framework for Computer Aided Process Engineering. Services that support efficient process engineering are defined. This definition is an outline of requirements for a CAPE environment. It is described how CAPE services can be used to practice process reuse. Subsequently, a scale is proposed to measure the explicitness of process and project context descriptions, and is followed by a scale to measure the conformance of process description and context description to the enacted process and actual context.The setting of PRS is briefly described. The current status of process and context descriptions is described by applying the scale of explicitness. The current conformance of descriptions to enacted process and actual context is described by applying the scale of conformance. The goal of PRS is formulated by phrasing it as an effort to move from one level of a scale to another.