Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
and formal assessments as they happen. This case study depicts some aspects of the
building and the filling of the course-of-action observatory.
The whole observatory is supported with several electronic tools such as semantic
wikis, content management system and dedicated applications. Semantic wikis offers
a lightweight authoring plate-form and will be used to record most events of the day-
to-day life in the project journal.
5.2 The Horizon of Software Engineering Standard
As told in section 4.1, the 12207:2008 standard acts as a standard umbrella and was
used during the introductory stage to define the framework of a software engineer's
activity. The 12207:2008 was preferred to CMMI because the former (used jointly
with the 15504 standard [17]) separates processes and capability levels in two dimen-
sions while CMMI handles them in one dimension. This separation was preferred
because it defines processes “(set of interrelated or interacting activities which trans-
forms inputs into outputs” [16]) independently from base practices (“an activity that,
when consistently performed, contributes to achieving a specific process purpose
[17]”).
The 43 processes are too many and complex to be used as the reference model and
we concentrate on 16, those related to the software development cycle, that is: 6.2.2
Infrastructure Management, 6.3.1 Project Planning, 6.3.2 Project Assessment and
Control, 6.4.1 Stakeholder Requirements Definition, 6.4.4 Implementation Process
replaced by 7.1.1 Software (SW) Implementation Process and its 6 sub-processes,
7.2.1 SW Documentation Management, 7.2.2 SW Configuration Management, 7.2.3
SW Quality Assurance, 7.2.4 and 7.2.5 SW Verification & Validation, 6.4.7 SW In-
stallation. Processes are grouped into process groups (five 12207 group processes are
concerned that we regrouped in three).
The 6 young engineers chosen for this case study have a Bachelor in Information
Technology (4-year studies in the field) and they work in large companies with a
structured corporate baseline. However, there is a need for a common reference of the
terms used, either because they have different significations in the different compa-
nies, or because their signification is unknown or fuzzy. We choose to use the
ISO/IEC FCD 24765, “Systems and software engineering - Vocabulary [18]”.
We dispose of a PDF version of the 12207:2008, licensed by ISO and of a electronic
version of the 24765, copyrighted by ISO but free of use as long as the copyright is
cited. As the project goes along and its events are recorded in the project journal, and in
order to facilitate links between the project journal and Software Engineering standards
used at the horizon, the whole team filled two semantic wikis with a subset of the two
standards used:
•
the 12207 wiki (http://oysterz.univ-brest.fr/12207) is an hypertext reference
of the ISO/IEC 12207:2008 for the process level : title, purpose, list of out-
comes and process decomposition in activities and tasks;
•
the 24765 wiki (http://oysterz.univ-brest.fr/24765) is a subset of the ISO/IEC
24765 vocabulary, it is actually under reengineering but on-line SEVOCAB
is provided by ISO (http://pascal.computer.org/sev_display).
