Software processes are software too

The major theme of this meeting is the exploration of the importance of.ul process as a vehicle for improving both the quality of software products and the the way in which we develop and evolve them. In beginning this exploration it seems important to spend at least a short time examining the nature of process and convincing ourselves that this is indeed a promising vehicle. We shall take as our elementary notion of a process that it is a systematic approach to the creation of a product or the accomplishment of some task. We observe that this characterization describes the notion of process commonly used in operating systems-- namely that a process is a computational task executing on a single computing device. Our characterization is much broader, however, describing any mechanism used to carry out work or achieve a goal in an orderly way.