Enhancing design methods to support real design processes

Software design methods typically focus on the activities that individual designers should perform under ideal circumstances. They rarely, if ever, address the activities that should be performed when things do not go according to plan, such as when a customer requests changes to the specification, or when early design decisions must be changed. They also rarely address issues involving coordination of multiple designers in cooperative design tasks or in competition for limited resources. We are investigating fundamental concepts required for more complete definition of design methods, developing linguistic mechanisms within a process programming language to support these concepts, and validating these through the definition of a process program that incorporates the Booch method.