The REMIS approach for rationale-driven process model evolution

In dynamic and constantly changing business environments, the need to rapidly modify and extend the software process arises as an important issue. Reasons include redistribution of tasks, technology changes, or required adherence to new standards. Changing processes ad-hoc without considering the underlying rationales of the process design can lead to various risks. Therefore, software organizations need suitable mechanisms for storing and visualizing the rationale behind process model design decisions in order to optimally introduce future changes into their processes. This paper presents REMIS (Rationale-driven Evolution and Management Information System), a prototype tool we have developed for providing support to process engineers during the task of collecting the reasons for process changes, introducing the changes, and storing them together in a process model evolution repository. Additionally, we present lessons learned with REMIS during the evolution of a reference process model for developing service-oriented applications.