Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are elaborated and reinterpreted as the work progresses. Interactive process models are created and updated by the project participants to reflect evolving plans. The execution of such models is controlled by users and only partially automated. An interactive process system should - Enable modelling by end users, - Integrate support for ad-hoc and routine work, - Dynamically customise functionality and interfaces, and - Integrate learning and knowledge management in everyday work.

This chapter draws attention to the question of determining the conditions when free/open source software development may represent a significant alternative to modern software engineering techniques for developing large-scale software systems. F/OSSD often entails shorter development times that can produce higher quality systems, and incur lower costs than may be realized through developing systems according SE techniques. Understanding why and how this may arise is the focus of this chapter. It presents, analyzes, and compares data collected from different F/OSSD projects, including an in-depth case study, to help develop such an understanding. The goal of this chapter is to determine the circumstances and conditions when F/OSSD represents a viable alternative to SE for the development of complex software systems. In particular, the chapter seeks to contrast differences observed in the arrangement and tooling of their respective software development practices, production resources, technical regimes, and community practices in which they are embedded. This in turn may then help identify how the practice and principles of SE might be improved.

Abstract. Software process is viewed as an important factor to deliver high quality products. Although there have been several Software Process Models proposed, the software processes are still short of formal descriptions. This paper presents an ontology-based approach to express software processes at the conceptual level. An OWL-based ontology for software processes, called SPO (Software Process Ontology), is designed, and it is extended to generate ontologies for specific process models, such as CMMI and ISO/IEC 15504. A prototype of a web-based process assessment tool based on SPO is developed to illustrate the advantages of this approach. Finally, some further research in this direction is outlined. 1

“[A]ll researchers interpret the world through some sort of conceptual lens formed by their beliefs, previous experiences, existing knowledge, assumptions about the world and theories about knowledge and how it is accrued. The researcher’s conceptual lens acts as a filter: the importance placed on the huge range of observations made in the field (choosing to record or note some observations and not others, for example) is partly determined by this filter” (Carroll and Swatman, 2000, pp.118-119).

When starting the software process improvement (SPI) journey, there are many SPI standards to select from. Selecting good SPI standards can be a technical problem, from a software engineering point of view, but it can also be a political problem, some standards fitting more with internal political agendas than others. As it is well-known that SPI without management commitment can have disastrous effects on SPI, so can also be the consequence of selecting standards that are technically unfit. The dilemma on how to select SPI standards provides a picture of SPI as a political game played out between managers, software engineers and SPI people. Starting with SPI from the viewpoint of control theory, the paper identifies different conflict situations within the control theory framework, and suggests using game theory and drama theory for finding optimal control strategies. Drama theory is further explored through a SPI case study that illustrates how SPI standards stabilize in spite of conflicts and social disaster. The contribution of the paper consists of introducing the concept of ‘evolutionary drama theory’ (derived from evolutionary game theory, EGT) as a tool for describing and analysing how an artefact like a SPI standard evolves towards equilibrium (evolutionary stable strategy, ESS) by looking at repeated dramas where equilibriums may not necessarily be found or, if

Software development is type of work that demands effective processes to support organizing the work: “A software process can be defined as the coherent set of policies, organizational structures, technologies, procedures, and artifacts that are needed to conceive,