What Is EPF?

EPF, a project carried out under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation, is aimed at building an open source process framework. IBM originally suggested the initiative, and many other companies and organizations jointly proposed and supported it. At the project's inception, the following companies were joint proposers: 2-Pro Mentor, Adaptive, AmbySoft, Armstrong Process Group, BearingPoint, Bedarra Research Lab, Capgemini, Catalysts, Covansys, European Software Institute, Ivar Jacobson International, Kruchten Engineering Services, Number Six Software, Object Mentor, Softeam, and the University of British Columbia. Project supporters included Jaczone, Object Management Group (OMG), NTTComware, Sogeti, Unisys, and Wind River. Additional companies and individuals with an interest in furthering the state of software development are continually joining this growing team.

EPF provides an executable language for processes.

EPF has two goals. The first is to provide an extensible process engineering framework and tools. The extensible process framework provides an executable language for processes (see the section Software Process Engineering Metamodel on page 368). It also provides tools to support method authoring, process authoring, library management, configuring, and publishing of a process, as well as a core set of process engineering capabilities on which additional process engineering tools can be built (see the section Extensible Process Engineering Tools on page 374).

EPF promotes iterative and agile development practices.

The second goal of EPF is to provide the software development community with extensible process content that promotes iterative and agile development practices such as continuous integration and testing throughout the project lifecycle, while minimizing overhead and high degrees of formality. These practices should serve as sample content as well as a foundation for a variety of processes that may reuse this content. The section Extensible Process Content on page 367 provides more information.

To jumpstart the project, IBM contributed an initial set of tools and content, as well as an evolving metamodel foundation.