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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>
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