Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 8
The Semantics of
Processes
If you can't describe what you are doing as a process,
you don't know what you're doing.
—W. Edwards Deming
There seems to be a process for everything: clinical trials, school admis-
sions, impeaching presidents, and, of course, developing software. Such
processes are closely linked to repeatability; they allow highly repeatable
tasks to be performed with added efficiency. The emergence of the
industrial age and the extensive use of machinery has a lot to do with
the emergence of processes. There have always been methods, practices,
and recipes, mostly used in one-off situations. When they needed to be
automated, they had to be converted to a process. For example, the recipe
for making a chocolate cake is good enough to make a cake at home.
The same recipe must be converted into a manufacturing process to make
hundreds of such cakes every hour. The recipe has not gone away — it
still drives the “design” of the cake. The process is the implementation
of that design. Software development processes also are attempts to
capture the essence of software development, and make it repeatable,
predictable, and scalable.
The word “process” has its roots in the 14th century
-
-
,
meaning “to go forward.” With its 17th century incarnation in English,
Latin
procedere
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