Relation analysis among patterns on software development process

The activity of the software process improvement can be supported by reusing various kinds of knowledge on existing successful software processes in the form of process patterns. There are several catalogs of process patterns available on WWW; however, all of relations among patterns are closed in each pattern catalog. To acquire the cross-cutting relations over the different process pattern catalogs, we have applied the technique for the automatic relation analysis among the patterns. Our technique utilizes existing text processing techniques to extract patterns from documents and to calculate the strength of pattern relations. As a result of experimental evaluations, it is found that the system implementing our technique has extracted appropriate cross-cutting relations over the different process pattern catalogs without information on relations described in original pattern documents. These cross-cutting relations will be useful for dealing with larger problems than those dealt with by individual process patterns.