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| <h1 class="topictitle1">About Eclipse Process Framework Composer</h1> |
| <div><p>Welcome to Eclipse Process Framework Composer (EPF Composer). EPF Composer is a tool platform that |
| enables process engineers and managers to implement, deploy, and maintain |
| processes for organizations or individual projects. Typically, two key problems |
| need to be addressed to successfully deploy new processes.</p> |
| <p>First, development teams need to be educated on the methods applicable |
| to the roles that they are responsible for. Software developers typically |
| need to learn how to do analysis and design, testers need to learn how to |
| test implementations against requirements, managers need to learn how to manage |
| the project scope and change, and so on. Some organizations assume that developers |
| implicitly know how to do such work without documenting their methods, but |
| many organizations want to establish common and regulated practices, to drive |
| specific improvement objectives, and to meet compliance standards. </p> |
| <p>Second, development teams need to understand how to apply these methods |
| throughout a development lifecycle. That is, they need to define or select |
| a development process. For example, requirements management methods have to |
| be applied differently in early phases of a project where the focus is on |
| elicitation of stakeholder needs and requirements and scoping a vision, than |
| in later phases where the focus is on managing requirements updates and changes |
| and performing impact analysis of these requirements changes. Teams also need |
| clear understanding of how the different tasks of the methods relate to each |
| other, for example, how the change management method impacts the requirements |
| management method as well as regression testing method throughout the lifecycle. |
| Even self-organizing teams need to define a process that gives at minimum |
| some guidance on how the development will be scoped throughout the lifecycle, |
| when milestones will be achieved and verified, and so on. </p> |
| <div class="p">To that end, EPF Composer has two main purposes:<ul><li>To provide a knowledge base of intellectual capital which you can browse, |
| manage and deploy. This content can include externally developed content, |
| and, more importantly, can include your own content including of whitepapers, |
| guidelines, templates, principles, best practices, internal procedures and |
| regulations, training material, and any other general descriptions of your |
| methods. This knowledge base can used for reference and education. It also |
| forms the basis for developing processes (the second purpose). EPF Composer is designed |
| to be a content management system that provides a common management structure |
| and look and feel for all of your content, rather than being a document management |
| system in which you would store and access hard to maintain legacy documents |
| all in their own shapes and formats. All content managed in EPF Composer can be published |
| to html and deployed to Web servers for distributed usage. </li> |
| <li>To provide process engineering capabilities by supporting process engineers |
| and project managers in selecting, tailoring, and rapidly assembling processes |
| for their concrete development projects. EPF Composer provides catalogs of pre-defined |
| processes for typical project situations that can be adapted to individual |
| needs. It also provides process building blocks, called capability patterns, |
| that represent best development practices for specific disciplines, technologies, |
| or management styles. These building blocks form a toolkit for quick assembly |
| of processes based on project-specific needs. EPF Composer also allows you to set up |
| your own organization-specific capability pattern libraries. Finally, the |
| processes created with EPF Composer can be published and deployed as Web sites. </li> |
| </ul> |
| </div> |
| <div class="p"><strong>Eclipse Process Framework Composer Key Concepts</strong><ul><li>Provides completely redesigned tools for authoring, configuring, viewing, |
| and publishing development processes. </li> |
| <li>Provides just-in-time generation of publication previews in dedicated |
| browsing perspective that allows rapid configuration switching. </li> |
| <li>Manages method content using simple form-based user interfaces. Therefore, |
| UML modeling skills are no longer required. </li> |
| <li>Provides intuitive rich text editors for creating illustrative content |
| descriptions. Editors allow use of styles, images, tables, hyperlinks, and |
| direct HTML editing.</li> |
| <li>Allows creating processes with breakdown structure editors and workflow |
| diagrams through use of multi-presentation process editors. Breakdown structure |
| editor supports different process views: work-breakdown view, work product |
| usage view, and team allocation view. EPF Composer automatically synchronizes all presentations |
| with process changes. </li> |
| <li>Provides support for many alternative lifecycle |
| models. For example, waterfall, incremental, or iterative models can be created |
| with the same overlapping method content. </li> |
| <li>Improved reuse and extensibility capabilities. The plug-in mechanisms |
| from past versions have been extended to support extensions for breakdown |
| structures.</li> |
| <li>Supports reusable dynamically-linked process patterns of best practices |
| for rapid process assembly via drag-and-drop. </li> |
| </ul> |
| </div> |
| <p><strong>Key Terminology and Concepts</strong></p> |
| <p>To effectively work with EPF Composer, you need to understand a few |
| concepts that are used to organize the content. The pages Method Content Authoring |
| Overview and Process Authoring Overview contain more detail and concrete examples |
| of how to work in the tool. This page provides you with a general overview |
| of these concepts. </p> |
| <p>The most fundamental principle in EPF Composer is the separation of reusable core |
| method content from its application in processes. This directly relates back |
| to the two purposes of EPF Composer described in the first section. Almost all of EPF Composer's |
| concepts are categorized along this separation. Method content describes what |
| is to be produced, the necessary skills required and the step-by-step explanations |
| describing how specific development goals are achieved. These method content |
| descriptions are independent of a development lifecycle. Processes describe |
| the development lifecycle. Processes take the method content elements and |
| relate them into semi-ordered sequences that are customized to specific types |
| of projects. </p> |
| <p><img src="uma_hump.gif" alt="" /></p> |
| <p>The figure above shows how this separation is depicted in Basic Unified |
| Process. Method content, describing how development work is being performed, |
| is categorized by disciplines along the y-axis of the diagram. The work described |
| in a process is seen along the x-axis representing the timeline. This is the |
| lifecycle of a development project. It expresses when what work will be performed. |
| The graph in the illustration represents an estimated workload for each discipline. |
| As you see, for example, one never stops working on requirements in OpenUP/Basic, but |
| there are certainly peak times in which most of the requirements elicitation |
| and description work is performed. There are also times at which a downward |
| trend needs to be observed where fewer and fewer requirements changes have |
| to be processed to bring the project to a close. This avoids what is referred |
| to as feature creep in which requirements work remains constant or even increases. |
| Hence, a lifecycle (process) expresses the variances of work performed in |
| the various disciplines (method content). </p> |
| <p><img src="meth_vs_proc.gif" alt="" /></p> |
| <p>The picture above provides a summary of the key elements used in EPF Composer and |
| how they relate to method content or process. As you see, method content is |
| primarily expressed using work products, roles, tasks, and guidance. Guidance, |
| such as checklists, examples, or roadmaps, can also be defined to provide |
| exemplary walkthroughs of a process. On the right-hand side of the diagram, |
| you see the elements used to represent processes in EPF Composer. The main element |
| is the activity that can be nested to define breakdown structures as well |
| as related to each other to define a flow of work. Activities also contain |
| descriptors that reference method content. Activities are used to define processes |
| of which EPF Composer support two main kinds: delivery processes and capability patterns. |
| Delivery processes represent a complete and integrated process template for |
| performing one specific type of project. They describe a complete end-to-end |
| project lifecycle and are used as a reference for running projects with similar |
| characteristics. Capability patterns are processes that express and communicate |
| process knowledge for a key area of interest such as a discipline or a best |
| practice. They are also used as building blocks to assemble delivery processes |
| or larger capability patterns. This ensures optimal reuse and application |
| of their key best practices in process authoring activities in EPF Composer.</p> |
| </div> |
| <div><div class="relconcepts"><strong>Related concepts</strong><br /> |
| <div><a href="methodauthoringoverview.html#methodauthoringoverview">Method Content Authoring Overview</a></div> |
| <div><a href="processauthoringoverview.html#processauthoringoverview">Process Authoring Overview</a></div> |
| </div> |
| </div> |
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