Towards a Workflow Language for Software Engineering

Software development processes are broadly used by software providers to ensure the quality and reproducibility of their development endeavors. These processes are typically abstractly defined, individually interpreted by individuals, and manually executed, making governance and compliance difficult. Additionally, process tailoring, reuse, exchange, and any IT-based automation or guidance at the more practical lower level workflows is hindered or more burdensome without a common language for expression. Automated guidance and highly integrated process support holds potential for retaining process-centered advantages while reducing hindrances. In this paper, work on a language for the description of software engineering processes is presented. It unifies the abstract specification and documentation of processes with automated process enactment support, while, in turn, fostering reusability and tailoring of these processes. For enactment, various workflow management systems can be chosen whose models are automatically generated. The approach shows promise for enabling IT process support in the software engineering domain while supporting the exchange and objective comparison of enactable processes and practices.