Process Diversity and how Practitioners Can Manage It

Since IT projects are unique regarding their combination of specific goals, technologies in use, and characteristics, providing ‘general’ processes it is not an effective solution. Instead effective and efficient processes custom tailored to a project and based on experience collected during past projects execution are required. This is in contrast with the industry practices where reuse-oriented process descriptions and goaloriented planning are often missing. Usually a process can undergo a certain numbers of modifications, due to the different operative contexts in which it is executed. The modifications generate many different versions of the process, named specialized processes. Each one of these must be managed properly in order to govern a just evolution consistently with all the others. Considered the dimension of the actual scenarios, maintaining all the processes and their specialized versions is not a trivial task. We have defined a process pattern based framework to accomplish this purpose. In this paper we present the framework, that we are realizing with an Italian enterprise, and an explanatory case study we are developing within the Research Centre on Software Technology in Bari, Italy.