The Process Practice

This week I had the honor of presenting our work around SPEM 2, Eclipse Process Framework, and Rational Method Composer at the SEE 2008 Conference (Software and Systems Engineering Essential) in Bern. If you are interested to see what this was all about then go here for the abstract and here for the presentation slides.

After almost three years since our initial specification submission to the OMG I am proud to announce that the formal Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model 2.0 specification is now officially available on the OMG Web server. Please, go and get it here: http://www.omg.org/spec/SPEM/2.0/.

The SPEM 2.0 Beta 2 specification is now available on the OMG server here:

http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?ptc/07-11-01

This is almost the final specification before the final approvals by the OMG’s business committee and vote of the board of directors in December. However, content wise this is it. The document’s title page contains urls to all the related xml documents as well.

The OMG just released a report about an interdisciplinary case study of OMG and Open Group members to evaluate modeling the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) ADM (Architecture Development Method) with OMG meta-models, in particular SPEM. It provides some good insights and examples for how SPEM can be utilized as a representation framework for systematically formalizing an informally described method. This report uses SPEM 1.1, but provides pointers to SPEM 2.0. One of the authors of this report actually has started a new project in which he captures parts of these models (and also more importantly the textual content) using EPF Composer, which you can find here.

Good news. Last Thursday the OMG’s Architecture Board accepted our Finalization Report for the OMG Software and Systems Process Engineering Meta-Model (SPEM 2.0). In other words the specification work is done and the documents are official! All we still have left to do is to create a pretty looking document without change bars and publish that. In the meantime you can use the documents listed below.

I cannot express how happy I am that after almost three years of work this specification is finally ready. I would like to thank every contributor and supporter for their hard work and support. See the (hopefully) complete list of names in the spec itself. I learned so much during this process, including some quite sad facts of life such as ‘being a good politician is more important than being a good engineer’. 🙂

This week the OMG SPEM Finalization Task Force finished its work and we produced an updated version of the SPEM 2.0 specification that incorporates fixes for all reported issues. Go here to download the latest specification document from the OMG server. If you are interested in the models then you can get the meta-model files here (in CMOF and Rational Software Modeler 7 format) and the UML 2 Profile here (in XMI and IBM Rational Software Modeler 7 format).

If you are interested in the issues that were addressed in the final adopted specification (get the old adopted spec here) you can download and review the FTF’s report which we are going to present at the upcoming OMG meeting in Jacksonville end of September.

This should be the final activity to finalize SPEM 2.0 and it should then be ready for publication as a formal OMG specification.