Customizable process specification and enactment for technical and non-technical users

Abstract

This dissertation presents a perspective within the process programming paradigm in which the human team member, rather than the hardware CPU, is considered the processor responsible for executing the process program. The dissertation compares the requirements on traditional programming languages with those for process programming languages designed to specify processes primarily executed by humans. This results in the identification of five critical issues for process programming languages: supporting specification of human-executed operations, providing support for both human resources and non-human resources (e.g., budgets, computers, meeting rooms), allowing development of corporate- and project-specific customizations, providing accessibility for both technical and non-technical users, and support for dynamic change. The dissertation presents a set of solutions to meet the identified requirements. A new object model is developed which supports technical and non-technical users. This object model, called the category object model, allows a technical user to define sets of corporate- or project-specific abstractions for later use by a non-technical process programmer. The category model hides implementation details from the non-technical user. The model can be used to define new activity types, new resource types (including non-human resources), and new artifact types. A new network model, called activity networks, is defined. This formalism allows users to define the control flow between activities, the data flow between activities and between a parent activity and its subactivities, and the resource assignment relationships between a parent activity and its subactivities. Activity networks are designed for use by non-technical process specifiers. In addition, the dissertation proposes the use of hypermedia links as a navigational model for process programming systems. The dissertation also shows how annotations on process programs can provide access to computer-supported cooperative work systems in a process context based manner. The dissertation presents a number of validation activities including development of an executing language based on the models, use of the category model in a variety of typical usage scenarios, use of activity networks to specify processes at IBM Federal Systems Company, and presentation of a user interface mockup to managers, software engineers, and researchers.

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