The OPEN Process Framework: An Introduction - Softcover

Firesmith, Donald; Henderson-Sellers, Brian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0201675102 ISBN 13: 9780201675108

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2001

Synopsis

"[The authors] have done an excellent job of bringing forth the power and the flexibility of this most useful framework in an easy to read and understand introduction. Although it has been written to be an introductory text in OPF, I found [it] also readily useable as a handbook for initial process definition, an accessible treatment of important issues in software process design, and a textbook in OPF."

Houman Younessi

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

 The OPEN Process Framework provides a template for generating flexible, yet disciplined, processes for developing high-quality software and system applications within a predictable schedule and budget. Using this framework as a starting point, you can create and tailor a process to meet the specific needs of the project.

About this title

About the Author

 Donald Firesmith is President of Firesmith Consulting where he provides high-impact consulting and training in object development. He has worked exclusively with object technology since 1984. During this time, he has fulfilled many roles including director of data processing, technical project leader, requirements engineer, architect, designer, programmer, tester, process engineer, configuration manager, data manager, quality engineer, and trainer.  The author of five books on object technology, including Documenting a Complete Java Application using OPEN, he is internationally known as an object methodologist specializing in the areas of project management, requirements engineering, system and software architecting, and testing. For the last four years he has concentrated on web development including business and technical strategy, digital branding, and website architecting. Brian Henderson-Sellers is Director of the Centre for Object Technology  Applications & Research and Professor of Information Systems at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is author of nine books on object technology and is well-known for his work in Object Oriented methodologies and metamodelling (MOSES, COMMA and OPEN) and in Object Oriented metrics. He was recently voted number 3 in the Who's Who of Object Technology (Handbook of Object Technology, 1999, Appendix N) and, in July 2001, was awarded a DSc by the University of London for his extensive and significant contributions to object-oriented methodologies.    

From the Back Cover

The OPEN Process Framework: An Introduction

Donald Firesmith & Brian Henderson-Sellers

The OPEN Process Framework provides a template for generating flexible, yet disciplined, processes for developing high-quality software and system applications within a predictable schedule and budget. Using this framework as a starting point, you can create and tailor a process to meet the specific needs of the project.

If you are a project manager, process engineer or developer evaluating or thinking of adopting the OPEN Process Framework, this book is for you.

You will:

• Learn what the OPEN Process Framework is and how its use differs from specific development methods
• Master the basic concepts of the OPEN Process Framework and understand their structure and interrelationships
• Learn how to instantiate the OPEN Process Framework to construct a process that meets the needs of specific projects and organizations

 

 

"Are you involved with software development, requirements engineering, design, or domain modeling? Then you¿ve used and no doubt modified a software engineering process. At last there¿s a book with a comprehensive approach to creating S.E. processes. The OPEN Process Framework is a modern, object-oriented approach for creating and tuning a process perfectly suited to your particular job. This book lays out the whole OPF framework in a thorough, authoritative, and accessible way. I¿ve been waiting for a book like this for a long time. Highly recommended!"

Thomas B. Passin,

Principal Systems Engineer, Mitretek Systems

 

"[The authors] have done an excellent job of bringing forth the power and the flexibility of this most useful framework in an easy to read and understand introduction. Although it has been written to be an introductory text in OPF, I found [it] also readily useable as a handbook for initial process definition, an accessible treatment of important issues in software process design, and a textbook in OPF."

Houman Younessi

Associate Professor of Computer Science, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

About the authors:

Donald Firesmith

is President of Firesmith Consulting where he provides high-impact consulting and training in object development. He has worked exclusively with object technology since 1984. During this time, he has fulfilled many roles including director of data processing, technical project leader, requirements engineer, architect, designer, programmer, tester, process engineer, configuration manager, data manager, quality engineer, and trainer.

The author of five books on object technology, including Documenting a Complete Java Application using OPEN, he is internationally known as an object methodologist specializing in the areas of project management, requirements engineering, system and software architecting, and testing. For the last four years he has concentrated on web development including business and technical strategy, digital branding, and website architecting.

Brian Henderson-Sellers is Director of the Centre for Object Technology

Applications & Research and Professor of Information Systems at the University of Technology, Sydney. He is author of nine books on object technology and is well-known for his work in Object Oriented methodologies and metamodelling (MOSES, COMMA and OPEN) and in Object Oriented metrics. He was recently voted number 3 in the Who's Who of Object Technology (Handbook of Object Technology, 1999, Appendix N) and, in July 2001, was awarded a DSc by the University of London for his extensive and significant contributions to object-oriented methodologies.

 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The OPEN Process Framework is a public domain framework for constructing processes for developing software-intensive applications and object-oriented business models. The OPEN Consortium is responsible for its development and maintenance. The OPEN Process Framework provides a template for generating flexible, yet disciplined, processes for developing high-quality software-intensive applications within a predictable schedule and budget. This book introduces to the reader the OPEN (Object-oriented Processes, Environment and Notation) Process Framework (or OPF) by documenting its underlying concepts, its predefined components, and the process construction and tailoring guidelines that can be used to create a well tuned process for specific projects.

Goals of this book

Using this book, you will:

Learn what the OPEN Process Framework is and how its use differs from specific development methods, even those that permit some tailoring.

Master the basic concepts of the OPEN Process Framework and understand their structure and interrelationships.

Learn how to instantiate the OPEN Process Framework to construct a process that meets the needs of specific projects and organizations.

Intended audience

This book is not intended to be a manual containing all possible information on OPEN, particularly if utilized on a very large complex project. Rather it is intended to offer an introduction to OPEN, its contents and its underpinning philosophy (that of a framework). In parts, it synopsizes or just gives examples rather than giving a full inventory (e.g., of all possible Work Products). If you intend to use OPEN on commercial projects, you should also consult the other books in the OPEN series or access one of the Websites that many companies are increasingly making available either publicly as a product or on their own internal intranets.

This book was written in response to frequent requests that members of companies wished to get an overview of OPEN in order to assess whether it would suit their requirements before delving into the full process specifications as found in, for example, The OPEN Process Specification by Graham et al. (1997).

Preface--Chapter 2, OPEN Process Framework Overview, introduces the OPEN Process Framework, its components and how it is to be used.

Part II, Specifics, provides details concerning the specific components of the OPEN Process Framework (OPF) and how to use them.

Chapter 3, Work Products, documents the OPF’s class library of predefined Work Products.

Chapter 4, Producers, documents the OPF’s class library of predefined Producers of the Work Products.

Chapter 5, Work Units, documents the OPF’s class library of predefined Work Units performed by the Producers of the Work Products.

Chapter 6, Stages, documents the OPF’s class library of predefined Stages including Cycles, Phases, Builds, and Milestones.

Chapter 7, Languages, documents the OPF’s class library of predefined Languages for documenting and constructing Work Products.

Chapter 8, Framework Usage Guidelines, provides guidelines for the extension, construction, and tailoring of the OPF for use on specific development or business reengineering projects.

The Appendices provide much more detailed and reference material.

Appendix A, List of acronyms — a list of all acronyms used.

Appendix B, Glossary — definitions of the most important technical terms used within OPEN.

Appendix C, Work Products — a full discussion on several groups of Work Products with special focus on Documents and Components.

Appendix D, Producers — detailed information on the full range of Producers, both Direct and Indirect.

Appendix E, Work Units — discussions on Activities and Tasks; list of OPEN Techniques.

Appendix F, Example Work Flow — one specific example related to the External Interface Specification Work Flow.

Appendix G, Metamodel Diagrams—the complete OPF metamodel.

Bibliography and References, listing all cited references plus some relevant background reading.

How to use this book

Managers considering using the OPF should use this book to gain a high-level description of the framework and overview of its reusable component parts. They should read Part I and skim the chapters in Part II, starting with development stages, producers, and work products.

Process engineers need an in-depth understanding of all parts of this book if they are to successfully construct project-specific processes from the OPF. They should read the entire book including the appendices.

Methodologists, with their extensive knowledge of development processes, may profitably skim the entire book, focussing on those areas of primary interest.

After reading Part I, developers may wish to first read the description of their role in the Producer chapter and their tasks in the Work Units chapter and the corresponding appendix. If they have been assigned to produce a work product, they may wish to immediately read about it in the Work Products chapter and the corresponding appendix. As with the documentation for any class or component library or repository, one typically reads about the relevant classes (in this case process components) first and then studies the remaining classes on an as-needed and/or time-available basis.

One can either read Part II of this book in a top-down or bottom-up manner. If you want to start with a top-level overview and work down, read the following chapters in the following order: stages, producers, work units, work products, and languages. If you prefer to start with the most primitive concepts and build upon them, read these chapters in the reverse order.

History of OPEN Process Framework

OPEN was created by a merger of several methodologies in the mid-1990s by active collaboration between a number of methodologists. Primarily, OPEN brings together the SOMA (Semantic Object Modeling Approach), MOSES and Firesmith methodologies with later merging of ideas from the Synthesis methodology. As well as these methodologists, there are over 30 other OO "gurus" worldwide who are involved in establishing the strategic direction of OPEN and helping improve it through their membership of the OPEN Consortium.

The main initial reason for creating OPEN was to help industry move to OO by decreasing the choice of methodology from over 20 in the early 1990s to a single digit figure by the end of the millennium.

Second, the members of the Consortium are those international figures who prefer a responsibility-driven approach to OO software development rather than a data-driven or perhaps a use-case driven approach such as Objectory with UML.

OPEN began to take shape in early 1995 with the merger of MOSES and SOMA, and by mid-1996 the Firesmith method was fully integrated. In the same timeframe, the Object Management Group (OMG) was calling for proposals for ideas on which to base a standard for an object-oriented metamodel, useful for OO analysis and design, which would permit CASE tool builders to create interoperable tools. This focus was very much smaller than a methodology and, although several members of 1 A metamodel is a model of a model. It delineates all the rules needed by which to construct models by creating instances of elements in the metamodel. These instances form the model.preface  #the OPEN Consortium have spent time contributing to the OMG effort at standardizing an OO metamodel, it was clear to them that more than a standard metamodel was needed for efficient and effective OO software development. Thus OPEN was born, to encompass all the aspects of application development (including the modeling language being addressed by OMG and the UML Partners). The first book describing the elements of OPEN as a full life cycle methodology was published in September 1997. In this book, we update the metamodel, expand the scope of OPEN (e.g., to better support Web development and business engineering) and summarize the easier elements of that more extensive and sophisticated book in order to provide information for those companies (and educators) about to embark on an OO path to the future. We will assume you understand basic OT concepts such as encapsulation, abstraction, classification, objects, interfaces, classes etc. OPEN even has its very own modeling language4 which is an alternative to UML — both are still supported and used, UML being by far the most commonly utilized by OPEN end-users.

Since that first book in 1997, the OPEN literature has grown, with a full book series being published with Addison-Wesley, a regular column in JOOP (Journal of Object-Oriented Programming) and an established and extensive Website (with mirrors) at http://www.open.org.au. A network of consultants, vendors, tools suppliers, and researchers offer worldwide support and the user base continues to grow. In 2001, a new initiative of the Object Management Group to create a standard metamodel for process has involved OPEN Consortium members as reviewers and the standards document cites OPEN in many places.

Finally, we note that OPEN supports true OO ideas. We believe that there are some very basic principles of object technology (OT) that should be your prime focus in developing software using OO principles. These are:

• object modeling as a very general technique for knowledge representation
• encapsulation/information hiding
• polymorphism, together with
• clear, jargon-free and well founded definitions of all terms; and
• extensive use of abstraction techniques, a foundation for semantically cohesive and encapsulated process "objects".

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all our colleagues who have supported us over the years and helped to promulgate OPEN as a viable OO/CBD process/methodology. We also wish to thank a number of our colleagues for reading an earlier draft of this book manuscript and providing invaluable comments. In alphabetical order, we wish to express our thanks to Richard Heycock, Klaas Koomen, David Lowe, Henrik Ortlepp (particularly for Figures 1.6, 2.4, 2.9 and for suggesting the style of Figures 8.3, 8.4 and 8.6), Thomas Passin, Vit Rudovich, Magdy Serour, Errol Thompson, Richard Veryard and Houman Younessi.

0201675102P12142001

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201675102
• ISBN 13: 9780201675108
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272