Software process reengineering: Toward a new generation of CASE technology
Judith D. Ahrens, Noah S. Prywes, Evan Lock · Journal of Systems and Software · 1995
Business process reengineering is generating considerable interest in the business community because of its demonstrated capacity to reduce costs and increase an organization's responsiveness to competitive challenges and opportunities. The software crisis, as evidence by escalating costs and sluggish responsiveness to changing requirements, is similar to the business problems now being addressed through the application of business process reengineering principles. This article applies three of these same principles to the software crisis: (1) the surfacing of tacit assumptions and an examination of them for error, obsolescence, or irrelevance; (2) a radical redefinition of processes; and (3) the use of technology as a process enabler. After applying these principles to the problems of software development, maintenance, and reengineering, we derived a radical redefinition of the software process. The capabilities of three integrated multitool CASE environments are proposed as an enabling technological infrastructure for the reengineered software process. These are the software specification, software engineering, and software reengineering environments. The reengineered software process and integrated environments are shown to leverage human resources from three sources: legacy software, domain architectures, and reuse libraries.