Process Mentor is Object Consulting’s commercially proven software development methodology. Its purpose is to provide the blueprint and operating procedures for running a component-based software development organisation. As such, it is a key tool for managing projects effectively and ensuring high quality software systems are delivered on time and within budget.

Process Mentor covers the entire software, development life-cycle from project initiation through requirements analysis, design development, testing and deployment. It provides software development teams with a step-by-step guide to plan, define, manage, and implement complex component-based software systems. It supports project managers, business analysts, architects, quality assurance personnel, software engineers and testers by providing a clear process description and a well defined set of deliverables for each stage in the project cycle.

Benefits

Process Mentor provides the following tangible benefits to software development organisations:

• reduced risk of project failure
• increased timeliness of project delivery
• increased financial benefit of projects
• reduced wasted effort and cost of repair
• improved system reliability and quality
• increased financial return

Product Suite

Process Mentor comprises an integrated and extensible suite of products that optimize a team’s capability to deliver high quality software. These products allow organisations to pick and choose the technologies and platforms required for optimal solution delivery.

The products currently available in the Process Mentor suite include:

• Process Mentor Methodology – an industrial strength set of commercial best practice process definitions for software development within an extensible process architecture.
• Process Mentor RAPTOR – a process authoring and publishing tool that enables organisations to adapt and localise the Process Mentor methodology to suit their unique environment – and enables continuous refinement and evolution of re-usable process assets.
• Process Mentor Content Service – a web service that contains the process definitions published by RAPTOR. This service is available to other Process Mentor products – such as the Content Viewer and Process Mentor TeamGuide.
• Process Mentor Content Viewer – a customisable web-based client that allows the published process definitions within the Content Service to be viewed in a context that is specific and relevant to the organisation.
• Process Mentor TeamGuide – integrates the Process Mentor methodology into the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment.
• Process Mentor Accelerator for Changepoint – integrates the Process Mentor methodology into Compuware’s portfolio and program management platform.
• Process Mentor Accelerator for Microsoft Project – enables Microsoft project plans to be generated directly from the Process Mentor methodology.

Features

The Process Mentor product suite, through the provision of an extensive on-line portal containing reference manuals, templates and samples, enables organisations to quickly gain significant improvements in process capability. It achieves this by consolidating the following features.

Scalability

Process Mentor is suitable to both small scale and large scale projects. It has been successfully applied to projects developed by 2-4 people and to large scale projects employing more than 100 people.

Flexibility

Process Mentor can be tailored to best meet your organisational structures and longer term business goals.

Independence

Process Mentor is fully independent of any particular programming language, computing platform or development tool. It has been successfully applied to component-based development projects in Enterprise Java, Microsoft .Net and Open Source.

Quality

Process Mentor is based on the Software Engineering Institute and ISO 9000 approaches to software development and quality management systems. It has been used successfully by a number of organisations as part of their overall quality strategy.

Support

Process Mentor is a comprehensive, mature product. Support and training services are therefore well established and provide a complete and flexible support service to organisations.

For further information on Process Mentor please download the Process Mentor Fact Sheet or visit the Process Mentor website.