Brian Charles Warboys

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• B.Sc Mathematics
• Professor Emeritus at The University of Manchester

Incremental design allows the system developer to define the system software in convenient stages. Often when all the parts of the system are defined the system is ready for deployment. However it is possible to delay the definition of some parts of the system definition to when it is more convenient post-deployment. In this paper we will explore a...

Software that cannot evolve is condemned to atrophy: it cannot accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of its business goals nor intercept the potential of new technology. To accommodate change in software systems we have defined an active software architecture to be: dynamic in that the structure and cardinality of the components and...

Software that cannot change is condemned to atrophy: it cannot accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of its business goals nor intercept the potential of new technology. To accommodate change in such systems we have defined an active software architecture to be: dynamic in that the structure and cardinality of the components and inte...

Software that cannot evolve is condemned to atrophy: it cannot accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of its business goals nor intercept the potential of new technology. To accommodate change in software systems we have defined an active software architecture to be: dynamic in that the structure and cardinality of the components and...

This paper investigates the collective use of a simple modeling technology by highly complex, heterogeneous and numerous groups of stakeholders who heavily depend upon it to mediate their interactions. We use economic theory, design theory, complex systems theory and business process modeling concepts to analyze deregulation and business to busines...

This paper investigates the collective use of a simple modeling technology by highly complex, heterogeneous and numerous groups of stakeholders who heavily depend upon it to mediate their interactions. We use economic theory, design theory, complex systems theory and business process modeling concepts to analyze deregulation and business to busines...

This paper investigates the collective use of a simple modeling technology by highly complex, heterogeneous and numerous groups of stakeholders who heavily depend upon it to mediate their interactions. We use economic theory, design theory, complex systems theory and business process modeling concepts to analyze deregulation and business to busines...

Businesses and their supporting software evolve to accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of commercial goals, and to intercept the potential of new technology. We have adopted the term co-evolution to describe the concept of the business and the software evolving sympathetically, but at potentially different rates. More generally, we...

The term co-evolution describes the symbiotic relationship between dynamically changing business environments and the software that supports them. Business changes create pressures on the software to evolve, and at the same time technology changes create pressures on the business to evolve. More generally, we are concerned with systems where it is...

In many cases, the programmer may require to encode business rules into the database applications. To do this, a large number of program elements may need to be examined by the programmer, to determine which have the capacity to violate a new rule and if so what minimal changes are required to prevent such violations. This process can be time-consu...

We describe a natural revision-based logical modelling for evolvable component systems. In this paper, an evolvable component comprises two parts: a supervising process and its supervisee sub-component. The supervisor's role is to monitor and possibly evolve its supervisee, where evolu-tionary change may be determined purely internally from observa...

Purpose To construct, test and illustrate a sophisticated and theory‐based architecture for analyzing business process management systems (BPMS) used for business process change. Design/methodology/approach Exploration of business process modeling‐based BPMS via a meta‐survey of academic and business literatures. Two main dimensions are used based...

The ability of businesses to develop is frequently hampered by difficulties in changing underlying software systems. An example is the need to change when business partnerships are formed, or dissolved. This article is concerned with the architecture of business process support systems in the context of change, and particularly with the need for su...

Modern software development practices show that there is significant diversity in the product, process and geographical location of software development due to economical, technical and logistical constraints. Such diverse development demands flexibility in the software engineering methodology. In this paper, we propose the cellular development met...

Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined, used and evaluated. It is now possible to consider second generation languages based on this experience [1, 3,4]. Rather than develop a second generation wish list this position paper explores two issues: instances and connectors. Instances relate to the relationship between a p...

IntroductionEvolution and ComplianceA Generic Scheduling ProblemCompliance through ConfigurationExploiting an Analytical ModelDiscussionAcknowledgementsReferences

This paper reports on a small experiment, which although relatively simple, raises important issues about Process Model User Interfaces. It outlines an approach to the exploitation of the World Wide Web by Process-centred Software Support Environments. It concludes that there is great advantage to be gained from designing process systems so that th...

In this paper OBM, a method for developing concurrent systems in a formal framework is described. The method arose from an industrially collaborative project, and has been used, in various forms, to specify parts of operating systems, databases and retail systems. OBM allows a system to be gradually refined by levelled descriptions. Varying granula...

This paper investigates the collective use of a simple modeling technology by highly complex, heterogeneous and numerous groups of stakeholders who heavily depend upon it to mediate their interactions. We use economic theory, design theory, complex systems theory and business process modeling concepts to analyze deregulation and business to busines...

Many software systems implement, amongst other things, a collection of business rules. However, the process of evolving the business rules associated with a system is both time consuming and error prone. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to facilitating business rule evolution through capturing information to assist with the evolution of r...

COTS software products are increasingly becoming standard components for building integrated information systems. At the same time, the growth of electronic trading, turbulent market conditions, and a project-style approach to business have created a demand for information systems that can be rapidly adapted to changing business process demands. Ho...

Autonomic systems manage themselves given high-level objectives by their administrators. They utilise feedback from their own execution and their environment to self-adapt in order to satisfy their goals. An important consideration for such systems is a structure which is conducive to self-management. This paper presents a structuring methodology f...

This paper outlines our experience of using a reflective π-calculus based Architecture Description Language (ADL) to create an ’Active’ Software Engineering Environment (SEE). It describes the concept of an ’Active’ SEE developed as part of the, EU supported, project ArchWare. It analyses a small fragment of that implementation to illustrate the su...

This paper suggests that the workshop problem of managing the integration of processes based on both explicit and tacit knowledge needs to be addressed by questioning the classical software engineering paradigm. It illustrates a possible approach through a short description of the recently prototyped ArchWare system.

We investigate the concept of Smart Business Networks by using Beer's Viable System Model (VSM) to analyse how such a network mitigates the affect of emergent, and therefore unforecastable, demands upon the networked businesses. We examine the requirements for network smartness, highlight some significant properties of one Smart Network and use our...

A decision support system (DSS) is an interactive computer-based system that helps decision makers utilise data and models to solve complex and unstructured problems. Procurement is a decision problem of paramount importance for any business. A critical and vital procurement task is to select the best contractor during the tendering or bidding proc...

Self-adaptive systems modify their own behaviour in response to stimuli from their operating environments. The major policy considerations for such systems are determining what, when and how adaptations should be carried out. This paper presents mechanisms for feedback and change that support policy decisions for self-adaptation within a computatio...

Software that cannot evolve is condemned to atrophy: it cannot accommodate the constant revision and re-negotiation of its business goals nor intercept the potential of new technology. To accommodate change in software systems, we have defined an active software architecture to be: dynamic in that the structure and cardinality of the components and...

This paper gives an overview of the ArchWare European Project. The broad scope of ArchWare is to respond to the ever-present demand for software systems that are capable of accommodating change over their lifetime, and therefore are evolvable. In order to achieve this goal, ArchWare develops an integrated set of architecture-centric languages and t...

Traditionally, configuration of operating systems is done statically at compile- or link-time, but recently dynamic runtime configuration has become possible. Embedded systems however have constraints, such as limited memory and real-time requirements, that prevent many dynamically configurable operating systems from being used in an embedded syste...

Traditionally, configuration of operating systems is done statically at compile- or link-time, but recently dynamic runtime configuration has become possible. Embedded systems however have constraints, such as limited memory and real-time requirements, that prevent many dynamically configurable operating systems from being used in an embedded syste...

This is the report of the design and implementation of the ArchWare Evolution Meta-Process Model. This model forms one part of the behavioural tuple E, P that is the ArchWare component, and forms the basis for both the ArchWare system development environment and the Repository. Copyright © 2002 by the ArchWare Consortium CPR – Consorzio Pisa Ricerc...

Process models have an inherent need to rapidly evolve in order to maintain synchronization with the human domain that they are supporting. To support the required evolution, it is not sufficient that the support environment is built by making the entire application as flexible as possible to support all known future evolution processes. This is no...

There is an urgent industrial need to enforce the changes of business rules (BRs) to software systems quickly, reliably and economically. Unfortunately, evolving BRs in most existing software systems is both time-consuming and error-prone. In order to manage, control and improve BR evolution, it is necessary that the software evolution community co...

Nowadays, managers need to collaborate and interact with third parties in order to make critical technical and business decisions and improve organisational processes. Tendering is a complex decision process that involves extensive integration and collaboration between three parties: clients, consultants and contractors. Tendering processes can be...

Long-lived, architecture-based software systems are increasingly important. Effective process support for these systems depends upon recognising their compositional nature and the active role of their architecture in guiding evolutionary development. Current process approaches have difficulty with run-time architecture changes that are not known a...

My Grid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help them to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of my Grid and how it will be...

Network protocol stacks are traditionally encapsulated within system software, forcing the application programmer to use general-purpose communication end-point abstractions. The application programmer is denied the flexibility of implementing application-specific performance improvements. Application-level networking provides the application progr...

MyGrid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of myGrid and how it will be used by...

MyGrid is an e-Science Grid project that aims to help biologists and bioinformaticians to perform workflow-based in silico experiments, and help to automate the management of such workflows through personalisation, notification of change and publication of experiments. In this paper, we describe the architecture of myGrid and how it will be used by...

This paper presents the design of a new version of the Arena operating system targeted at real-time applications. Arena is a run-time operating system for parallel applications. The main principle of Arena is to provide predictable and controllable resource management. This is achieved by placing resource management at the user level of the system,...

This methodology is concerned with technologies for supporting contemporary business processes. In particular, it concerns those that are long-lived, critical to the businesses’ success, are distributed and supported on heterogeneous systems. Many of today’s organizations fall into this category and, for them to be effective, support technologies m...

Process systems aim to support many people involved in many processes over a long period of time. They provide facilities for storing and manipulating processes in both the representation and enactment domains. This paper argues that process systems should support ongoing transformations between these domains, at any level of granularity. The notio...

This paper describes the motivation of modeling processes as process patterns. The work presented here extends UML modeling into the domain of (meta-) process modeling. It shows, through an example, how (meta-) processes can be modeled as process patterns using collaborations in UML. The structural aspects of a process pattern are modeled using cla...

Note from the briefing for this talk. "Fundamental since software is the defining technology and prescribes the extent of automation designed into a system." The nature of modern computer systems is such that a single paradigm is an insufficient model. The paper attempts to show that what is required is for projects to create a design framework whi...

When a process system is adopted and used by any organization, the way in which improvements in the process system are delivered to its users has to be addressed. Through our experience we have adopted a particular approach for our ProcessWeb system: the system can rebuild itself in an evolutionary manner. In this paper we identify...

Software architectures are designed to meet the needs of the applications that use them. With conventional architectures this is done by predicting the average needs of the majority of the applications they support. In contrast, a compliant software architecture can accommodate the needs of a particular application. As the application evolves, its...

Machine Manual. As mentioned above, ProcessBase is the first in a family of languages. The reflective compiler is defined in terms of ProcessBase and implemented in it. Using that the hyper-code system will be added. The conceptual approach is that any language in the compliant architecture will be implemented by reflecting into ProcessBase itself....

. Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined and applied to software engineering environments. The idea of using a process language to encode a software process as a "process model", and enacting this using a process-sensitive environment is now well established. Many prototype process-sensitive environments have been dev...

This position paper discusses how the evolution of a software system can be affected by the compliance of its software architecture. The multi-user process support system, ProcessWeb [5], is used as an example. The impact that the fixed, non-compliant scheduling policy has had on the systems evolution is illustrated. The effect of compliance on evo...

The changing needs of modern application systems demand new and radical software architectures to support them. The attraction of persistent systems is that they define precisely the extent to which they are open, thereby allowing the dynamically changing resource requirements of applications to be tracked accurately within the persistent environme...

The paper outlines the π-SPACE architecture description language and its approach to architecture based software system synthesis and evolution. It addresses support for the composition of architectural elements, architecture evolution and the incremental synthesis of process models using the ProcessWeb process modelling language (PML). The full π-...

. This paper describes a framework that is intended to provide an infrastructure for the delivery of support for business processes -- including design processes, software development processes and procurement processes. This framework has to be capable of supporting quasi-independent process model instance evolution, and to provide seamless suppor...

Modelling is a core element of IT development. System development involves developing models which describe both business processes and the IT systems which support them. Modelling is typically undertaken during the design stage. To a large extent it is separated from the normal running of the business. The view is one of periods of stable business...

This paper presents the design of a new version of the Arena operating system targeted at real-time applications. Arena is a run-time operating system for parallel applications. The main principle of Arena is to provide predictable and controllable resource management. This is achieved by placing resource management at the user level of the system,...

Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined and applied to software engineering environments. The idea of using a process language to encode a software process as a “process model”, and enacting this using a process-sensitive environment is now well established. Many prototype process-sensitive environments have been devel...

get architecture, but without making any changes to the optimisation strategy. Further evaluation is required to establish the full extent of applicability of the GAPS techniques. This will form the next phase of our continuing programme. 2 Background The GAPS approach (see Figure 1) has been implemented using the Unified Transformation Framework (...

Modern business information systems need to support the co-ordination of people and existing software tools in addressing organisational goals. This must be done in an adaptable manner to cope with the inevitable changes of organisational goals, and in the ways of achieving them. An explicit co-ordination layer in a systems architecture embodies th...

This paper presents some results arising from the development of a prototype tool concerned with the automatic mapping of process models captured using Role Activity Diagrams (RADs), to the input to a Discrete Event simulator. The key element in our work is to establish, as a first step, the differences and common features between the concept domai...

This book concentrates on conceptual and technical aspects of process modelling and software process technology. Central to this purpose are questions such as: 1. How can we articulate process models in order to represent, analyse and validate soft-ware processes, and also to enact them. What are the required features of such for-malisms? Is it po...

Our concern is with the modern software production environment and, as mentioned in Section 1.7 we can focus our interest by exploring the distinction between a process being carried out in the real-world, and a model of that process. These two facets are: a real-world production process (P) including human participants or actors, CASE tools, etc....

Over the past decade a variety of process languages have been defined and applied to software engineering environments. The idea of using a process language to encode a software process as a "process model", and enacting this using a process-sensitive environment is now well established. Many prototype process-sensitive environments have been devel...

The cost effective and reliable evolution of systems is a significant software engineering challenge. Our approach is based on a combination of product modelling, process modelling and software metrics. We describe an empirical laboratory study following the evolution of three releases of a publicly available exemplar system. Analysis of the metric...

The cost-effective and reliable evolution of systems is a significant software engineering challenge. Our approach is based on a combination of product modelling, process modelling and software metrics. We describe an empirical laboratory study following the evolution of three releases of a publicly available exemplar system. Analysis of the metric...

Many emerging technologies, such as Computer Supported Co-operative Working (CSCW), Workflow systems, and virtual organizations envision the IT infrastructure of the future co-ordinating people and systems in addition to the traditional IT roles of data manipulation and information management. Central to this view are models of the business process...

'Care in the Community' is an easy catch phrase but a difficult goal. It is a phrase that addresses a current growth area within health care, and one that comes complete with an impressive array of political, economic and social factors that would seem to support the notion of a continuing trend. Technology, specifically information systems, howeve...

Recent trends focusing on process technology applied in different domains confirm the obvious fact that a quality product can only be the result of a quality process. One of the basic requirements for improving the quality of a process is to manage its complexity by means of modelling techniques using different levels of abstraction. A simple yet p...

This report is concerned with the implementation of an experimental system which aims to forge a link between the rapidly emerging technologies of the World Wide Web and a process support system, ProcessWise Integrator. Brief introductions of these two systems are given, then the actual design and implementation is discussed. The resulting system,...

The primary aim for this book is to gather and collate articles which represent the best and latest thinking in the domain of technology transfer, from research, academia and practice around the world. We envisage that the book will, as a result of this, represent an important source of knowledge in this domain to students (undergraduate and postgr...

The specification and refinement of a large software system is given using a concurrent, formally based framework. The framework, OBM, is concerned with the development of software process models. The case study of interest is an ICL retail system. In this paper, OBM is applied to the development of the system

There are issues of concern to software engineers that cannot be addressed in the context of a single development project. This paper indicates some typical issues, and proposes an "asset" view of the software development process to enable them to be considered. The asset view places less emphasis on the temporal ordering of activities and more on...

There are issues of concern to software engineers that cannot be addressed in the context of a single development project. This paper indicates some typical issues, and proposes an asset view of the software development process to enable them to be considered. The asset view places less emphasis on the temporal ordering of activities and more on th...

Large software systems have a large number of components and are developed over a long time period frequently by a large number of people. We describe a framework approach to evolving such systems based on an integration of product and process modelling. The evolving system is represented as a Product Tower, a hierarchy of components which provides...

Large software systems have a large number of components and are developed over a long time period frequently by a large number of people. We describe a framework approach to evolving such systems based on an integration of product and process modelling. The evolving system is represented as a Product Tower, a hierarchy of components which provides...

This paper is concerned with the issues which arise when we consider some potential impacts of Information Technology (IT) on established practises, in this case project management processes. Central to this consideration are models of the business process which help relate the process to the supporting IT tools and infrastructure. These models hav...

This paper is concerned with the thread-related interface primitives. These deal with thread context structures. These structures are conventional, and they reside at user-level in a thread context block (tcb). However, the thread context structures are de ned and interpreted by the HWO. That is, HWO interface operations are provided to initialize,...

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is much in vogue both as an approach to the rationalisation of Corporate Organisations and as an aid to the design of the IT system which supports the Organisation. The field of Software Process Modelling (SPM) started some 10 years ago with the objective of modelling and thence supporting the total set of soft...

This paper outlines a Case Study of the application of one approach to the Formal Specification of Parallel Object Oriented Systems to a Process Modelling language. The purpose was to both check whether such an approach was feasible and useful and also to give insight into the ongoing design of such Process Modelling Languages. Keywords:Process Mod...

This paper examines the work undertaken in the UK Alvey funded project IPSE 2.5 1 from the point of view of the approach taken to the development of the core system. It outlines the reasoning which led to the decision to base the system on a "active process" core rather than the more traditional approaches which have tended to support an entity der...

Recently many process modelling approaches have been developed. However, in most of these approaches, it is often assumed that the processes in an organisation are clearly defined, and therefore the emphasis of process modelling is often put on the final representation of the organisational process. However, in reality, processes are often not clea...

. In many existing process modelling approaches, the emphasis is on the representations of process models, but not so much on the development of them. In this paper we present a method, called OBM, for developing such representations using a stepwise refinement technique. An example is used to show how a model may be gradually refined. 1 Background...

this document, we assume that files and papers are available to their step objects only, therefore they are modelled as state variables of the step objects. (Data may be modelled as objects if they are globally available.) . Data from file(s) and paper(s): The data is obtained by reading from the state variable(s). . Data from another agent or step...

Recently, software process modelling has attracted an increasing research interest. For the purpose of comparing and contrasting different approaches to software process modelling, a common problem, referred to as the ISPW-6 software process example, was defined. Many solutions to this example have been provided by different people using different...

Recently, software process modelling has attracted an increasing research interest. For the purpose of comparing and contrasting different approaches to software process modelling, a common problem, referred to as the ISPW-6 software process example, was defined. Many solutions to this example have been provided by different people using different...

. In this paper a very simple reflexive formal software developmentmethod is described. The method is called OBM which providesa formal specification language. This paper demonstrates that the OBMdevelopment method can be defined as a process model in the OBMlanguage. An example is used to illustrate how to develop and modifyapplications using the...

The Third European Workshop on Software Process Technology (EWSPT) was held in Villard de Lans, France in February 1994. The proceedings are available as Lecture Notes in Computer Science LNCS 772, Springer-Verlag. This report is based on a collation of the reports of the session rapporteurs. Topics considered include: process modelling concepts; e...