User-centric Abstraction of Workflow Logic Applied to Software Engineering Processes

Software development is a dynamic, complicated, and labor-intensive undertaking. Numerous software engineering process models have been created and applied to address its complexity, schedule pressure, and product quality. These process models are rather abstract and not directly operationally relevant for the software engineers executing these processes, since they mostly provide relatively coarse-grained work packages and lack fine-grained user-centric workflows directly supporting users. Such user-centric workflows have been difficult to implement in an automated fashion as they are very dynamic and user acceptance for both modeling and prescribing such fine-grained activities is fairly low. This paper provides an approach to abstractly model user decisions influencing the actual trace of such automated workflows. By hiding internal complexity, communication with users is simplified while supporting required flexibility. This contributes towards removing hindrances and enabling the application of and user acceptance for automated user-centric workflows in software engineering and in domains exhibiting similar issues.