Development environments: A multilevel enactment scenario

The steps necessary to obtaining a development environment are detailed. The most important step in obtaining a development environment is deriving a process abstraction, that is, separating a product from the process used to create it. This separation is a major achievement of abstraction and, due to the need to decide which features of a process are specific to a specific product and which features are to be considered inherent to the process, is not straightforward. The concept is to separate the WHAT (one wants) from the HOW (this should be done). How these process abstractions can be used to compare process efficiency, as part of a development environment, is discussed, and the different application domains in which they could be useful are detailed. The interplay of instantiating and creating the process model is also discussed. The trends in and outlook of applying this multilevel enactment scenario are sketched