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| <head> |
| <title>Eclipse Process Framework Composer Overview</title> |
| </head> |
| <body> |
| <h3>Introduction to Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) Composer</h3> |
| <p>Welcome to Eclipse Process Framework (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> |
| <p>To that end, EPF Composer has two main purposes: </p> |
| <div align="left"><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.<br> |
| </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> |
| <h3>Eclipse Process Framework Composer's Key Capabilities</h3> |
| <p>IBM Eclipse Process Framework Composer provides the following new key capabilities:</p> |
| <div align="left"> |
| <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> |
| <h3>Key Terminology and Concepts</h3> |
| <p>To effectively work with EPF Composer, you need to understand a few concepts |
| that are used to organize the content. The pages <a href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showHelpTopic?id=/org.eclipse.epf.help.doc/html/methodauthoringoverview.html">Method |
| Content Authoring Overview</a> and <a href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showHelpTopic?id=/org.eclipse.epf.help.doc/html/processauthoringoverview.html">Process |
| Authoring Overview</a> 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"></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 RUP, 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="mc_vs_p.gif"></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> |
| |
| <p>For more details on Eclipse Process Framework Composer, see the online help:</p> |
| <div align="left"> |
| <ul> |
| <li><a href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showHelpTopic?id=/org.eclipse.epf.help.doc/html/aboutepfcomposer.html">Overview</a></li> |
| <li><a href="http://org.eclipse.ui.intro/showHelpTopic?id=/org.eclipse.epf.help.doc/html/standardmethodlibraryoverview.html">Getting |
| Started</a></li> |
| </ul> |
| </div> |
| <p></p> |
| </body> |
| </html> |