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<title>Eclipse Process Framework Composer Overview</title>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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>
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