Formalizing software engineering standards

A software engineering standard is an aid for systematic software development and process improvement. Because of the informal representation of software engineering knowledge, the document might be inconsistent, ambiguous, and incomplete. A more formal representation promises to overcome these shortcomings. Software process modeling is a direction within software engineering that aims at providing support for capturing software development processes. This paper describes the application of a particular software process modeling approach to three software engineering standards. The lessons learned about the standards, the modeling, and the resulting models are discussed in detail. In addition to the support currently available for both authors and users of standards, future directions of how to use progressive forms of software engineering standards are illustrated. Process modeling technology promises to speed up development, management, and tailoring of software engineering standards.