Support managed evolution of a process.
The understanding gained from our formal definitions helped us
to organize the process designs, to add required information,
and to remove inconsistencies in the informal
descriptions in all phases of the study.
An example of an inconsistency that we uncovered was our failure
to specify the preparation guidelines as input to a
``prepare asset'' process. Another problem which we discovered
was that a process used a product that was not available to that
process.
The original informal
descriptions
were modified to reflect our increased understanding of the
processes.
As we progressed from creating English descriptions of
processes to Abstraction Hierarchy Diagrams,
, and
MVP-L, we were able to improve our entire process
definition, in all notations. The
tool in particularly
made evolution of our process definition very simple. A change made
at one level in the graphical hierarchy was automatically reflected
in the other levels. When a requested change would cause the
deletion of items at other levels, the tool warned of the deletions
before the change was made.