Extreme Programming Perspectives

Chapter 41. Holmes A Heavyweight Support for a Lightweight Process

Giancarlo Succi, Witold Pedrycz, Petr Musilek, and Iliyan Kaytazov

Copyright © 2003, Giancarlo Succi, Witold Pedrycz, Petr Musilek, and Iliyan Kaytazov. All rights reserved.

In the last few years, we have noticed the appearance of a few new software process models, particularly for software product lines and agile methodologies. Examples of the former include the Rational Unified Process [Kruchten2000], FAST [Lai+1999], RSEB [Jacobson+1997], and Pulse [Bayer+1999]. The most well known example of the latter is XP [Beck2000]. Most of the processes for software product lines have associated tools that help adopt the process and automate the creation of various artifacts that are necessary within the different phases of the process.

The support for lightweight processes is mainly concentrated within well-known and existing development tools such as source code editors and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Examples of these are the applications/plug-ins that support the process of refactoring [Fowler1999] and unit testing. Some of these recently evolved into inseparable parts of IDEs. However, beyond the level of source code support, there is little tool support for lightweight processes.

We believe that the role of tool support goes beyond simple automation of tedious tasks. When the tool captures the essence of a process methodology, it can be successfully used to establish and institutionalize a given software process within a company. In this chapter, we discuss the requirements of a tool to support lightweight processes, and present a possible design and implementation of such a tool.