Prism = Methodology + process-oriented environment

Prism is an experimental-process-oriented environment, supporting methodical development, instantiation, and execution of software process models. This paper describes the Prism model and an architecture that captures this model in its various components. The architecture has been designed to hold a product software process description, the life-cycle of which is supported by an explicit representation of a higher level (or meta) process description. This paper also describes the nine-step Prism methodology for building and tailoring process models, and gives several scenarios to support this description. In Prism, process models are built using a hybrid process modelling language, which is based on a high-level Petri net formalism and rules. The Prism prototype has been implemented on UNIX, GRAS database for attributed graph structures, and the Sunview user interface. An important observation to note is that this work should be seen as an infrastructure, or a stepping stone, for carry ing out the more difficult task of creating sound process models.