A language for modeling software development life cycles

Abstract

As the profession of software engineering has continued to mature, a substantial body of work has built up in the area of software development life cycles. A variety of generic models ranging from waterfall to agile have appeared over the past few decades, all claiming to address prominent issues in software engineering. In this paper, the authors make an argument for developing a unifying language with the capabilities of defining and modeling any software development life cycle. The concept is similar to the way UML is a language that can be used to model any conceivable object oriented software solution. A number of reasons are provided as to why this would be a useful contribution to software engineering. The authors also discuss work which they have been carrying out in this area and outline the main features and semantics of such a language.