The Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) is an
open source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
project that is managed by the
Eclipse Foundation. It lies under the top-level
Eclipse Technology Project
An eclipse is an astronomical event that occurs when an astronomical object or spacecraft is temporarily obscured, by passing into the shadow of another body or by having another body pass between it and the viewer. This alignment of three cel ...
. It has two goals:
*To provide an extensible framework and exemplary tools for software process engineering - method and process authoring, library management, configuring and publishing a process.
*To provide exemplary and extensible process content for a range of software development and management processes supporting iterative, agile, and
incremental development, and applicable to a broad set of development platforms and applications. For instance, EPF provides the
OpenUP, an
agile software development
In software development, agile (sometimes written Agile) practices include requirements discovery and solutions improvement through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams with their customer(s)/ end user(s), ad ...
process optimized for small projects.
By using EPF Composer, engineers can create their own
Software development process
In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...
by structuring it using a predefined schema. This schema is an evolution of the SPEM
SPEM
1.1 OMG
OMG may refer to:
* Oh my God (sometimes also Oh my Goodness or Oh my Gosh), a common abbreviation, often used in SMS messages and Internet communication
Acronyms
* OMG is the IATA code for Omega Airport, Omega, Namibia
* Operational manoeuvre ...
specification referred to as the Unified Method Architecture (UMA). Major parts of UMA went into the adopted revision of SPEM, SPEM 2.0. EPF is aiming to fully support SPEM 2.0 in the near future. The UMA and SPEM schemata support the organization of large amounts of descriptions for development methods and processes. Such method content and processes do not have to be limited to software engineering, but can also cover other design and engineering disciplines, such as mechanical engineering, business transformation, and sales cycles.
IBM supplies a commercial version, IBM Rational Method Composer.
Limitations
The "Content Variability" capability severely limits users to one-to-one mappings. Processes trying to integrate various aspects may require block-copy-paste style clones to get around this limitation. This may be a limitation of the SPEM model and might be based on presumption that agile methods are being described as these methods tend not to have deep dependencies.
See also
* Meta-Process Modeling
References
{{Reflist
External links
Eclipse Process Framework site
Open content
Eclipse (software)
Software development process