Process Team

Definition

Process Team (a.k.a., Software Engineering Process Group or SEPG)

the team that is responsible for the methods processes that are used on one or more endeavors

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Process Team is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Abstract
• Superclass: Engineering Team
• Subclasses:
  • Organizational Process Framework Team
    a process team that is responsible for an organization’s standard process framework.
  • Endeavor Process Team
    a process team that is responsible for endeavor-specific processes constructed from the process framework.

Responsibilities

The typical team-specific responsibilities of a Process Team are to:

• Organizational Process Framework Team:
  • Construct and iterate an appropriate, well-documented organizational-standard process framework.
  • Ensure that this process framework is properly understood and followed.
• Endeavor Process Team:
  • Use the organization’s process framework to construct, tailor, and iterate one or more appropriate well-documented endeavor-specific processes.
  • Ensure that these derivative endeavor-specific processes are properly understood and followed.

Process teams typically inherit the general team responsibilities from the team process component.

Roles

Process teams typically consist of one or more persons playing the following roles:

• Technical Leader, who leads the team and ensures that the process framework or process is appropriate for the organization or endeavor respectively.
• Process Engineer(s), who construct and maintain the organizational process framework or the endeavor-specific processes.
• Technical Writer, who documents the process framework and its derivative processes.

Tasks

The process teams typically perform the following team-specific strategic and tactical process engineering tasks in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• The organizational process team typically performs the following strategic process engineering tasks in an iterative, incremental, and parallel manner:
  • Process Framework Needs Assessment
  • Process Framework Construction
  • Process Framework Documentation
  • Process Framework Iteration
• The endeavor process team typically performs the following tactical process engineering tasks in an iterative, incremental, and parallel manner:
  • Method Needs Assessment
  • Method Construction
  • Method Documentation
  • Method Maintenance

The process team typically inherits the common team tasks from the team process component.

Work Products

The process teams typically produce the following work products:

• Process Framework Documentation:
  • Process Framework Needs Assessment
  • Process Framework Description Document (or equivalent)
• Process Documentation:
  • Process Needs Assessment
  • Process Description Document (or equivalent)
  • Conventions:
    • Procedures
    • Role Descriptions
    • Guideline
    • Standards
    • Templates
    • Inspection Checklists

Guidelines

• A single endeavor process team may support one or more endeavors (e.g., a single project or the projects comprising an endeavor).
• Where practical, the membership of the two kinds of process teams should overlap.
• Each project tends to have its own endeavor process team, although a single endeavor process team could provide the processes for all projects within a program of projects. On huge, distributed development projects, each geographically distributed subset of the endeavor may need its own local representatives of the process team.
• The process team typically inherits the common team guidelines from the team process component.