Software Project Development Process Recommendation Using Best Practice Repository

A reasonable software process can help project manager managing life cycle of software development effectively,which can improve the control of risk.Because of the various influencing factor of software development,it is a knowledge-intensive work to design a suitable software process for the software project.On the other hand,huge amount of experience and knowledge has been accumulated in software process domain.Process experts have summed up the knowledge into process patterns to the same kind of problems.If these patterns can be reused,manpower in the design of software process will be saved greatly and the quality of process will be improved.In order to recommend suitable software project development process for project manager,this paper applies technology of natural language processing and machine learning to get application scenario questions and process flow chart of pattern from software process description text summarized by process expert.After that,this paper models the software process patterns and as a result the best practice repository is built.For a new project,the project manager obtains the recommended candidate process pattern list by answering the application scenario questions.After selecting,weaving and integrating the patterns in the candidate list,project manager gets the target software process.The contribution and innovation points mainly includes:1)This paper proposed a construction method for best practice repository based on software process patterns.This method gets application scenario questions with topic clustering from application scenario text in process pattern description text.And it gets process flow chart with extracting of process steps and modeling from solution text.With application scenario questions and process flow chart,the method builds the minimal basic unit of best practice repository.Based on the comparison experiment of text topic clustering,compared with traditional method based on statistics,this method has a better precision and recall in topic clustering of process pattern description text.2)This paper proposed a recommendation method for software process patterns.The method uses questionnaires to get the requirements of project manager and the degree of correlation between requirements and application scenario of process pattern.Application scenario questions are given to the project manager and he answers the questions with yes or no and the correlation degree out of 10 according to the project situations.The method calculates the sum of degree correlation by the answers of project manager and selects K of the highest sum of process patterns.Finally,the selected process pattern are combined as candidate lists.The result of experiment shows that the proposed method can recommend the suitable software process according to the project characteristics.3)This paper designs and implements the prototype of recommendation tool of software project process.Project manager answers application scenario questions according to his own project requirement.Prototype calculates the sum of correlation between manager's answers and process patterns in best practice repository and recommend K of the highest correlation patterns.With the help of prototype,project manager chooses patterns from the candidate list and changes the activity block and control flow of process pattern according to his situation.Finally,manager finishes the weaving and integration of process patterns and gets the target software process.