Software Development Patterns
EASE is a lightweight, strongly iterative software process, that is tailored to university project courses in software engineering. EASE identifies the driving forces of project courses. With respect to these driving forces EASE adapts notions of mature learning methodologies and combines them with proposed new concepts.
EASE consists of a macro process, a micro process and project tracking on the one hand side and a practices catalogue on the other hand. The student work proceeds in the micro process as a weekly alternation of meetings and exercises. The micro process encompasses project planning, preliminary teaching and an open space event. Project planning and preliminary teaching is done by the lecturer. In contrast to other recent software processes EASE is non-prescriptive from the outset:
- EASE neither is nor favors a concrete modeling or implementation paradigm.
- The EASE macro process and tracking are just recommendations.
- The several EASE practices and their mutual dependencies are recommendations in their own right.
The EASE practices form a process pattern languages:
- Fixed Total Number of Hours
- Artifact Orientation
- Simultaneous Improvement
- Collective Task Planning
- Small Changing Groups
- Collective Responsibility