OPEN

Introduction

Object-oriented Process, Environment, and Notation (OPEN) is a free, public domain, defacto industry-standard approach for the production of endeavor-specific development methods. OPEN was originally created in the mid-1990s as a merger of several earlier object-oriented software development methods, especially MOSES by Brian Henderson-Sellers, SOMA by Ian Graham, ADM3 by Firesmith, and Synthesis by Meilir Page-Jones. Since then, OPEN has grown and evolved to support the development, sustainment, and retirement of software-intensive systems as well as to support business [re]engineering.

As illustrated in the preceding figure, OPEN is composed of the following three parts:

1. OPEN Process Framework (OPF), which is a framework for process engineering (method engineering) consisting of the:
   • OPF Process Component Class Framework, which is a process metamodel that defines the standardized core abstract process component classes (method components), the relationships between them, and any constraints (i.e., well-formedness rules) that constrain these classes and their relationships
   • OPF Process Component Class Libraries, which consists of free, open-source, reusable process component subclasses of the classes in the process metamodel
   • OPF Reusable Methods, which are reusable process models made by integrating appropriate concrete process component classes from the OPF class libraries
   • OPF Usage Guidelines, which are guidelines that are used to construct new OPF-compatible process models (a.k.a., methods) or extend and tailor ones
2. OPF-compatible Environments, which are integrated sets of one or more tools that can be used for process engineering with the OPF
3. OPF-compatible Notations, which are one or more notations (e.g., OML, UML) that are appropriate for documenting the classes of process components stored in the OPF repository

OPEN Consortium

OPEN was developed and is maintained by the not-for-profit OPEN Consortium, an international group of methodologists, academics, CASE tool vendors and developers. Membership is open to anyone wishing to support the maintenance, enhancement, and promotion of OPEN. The OPEN Consortium is currently co-chaired by Brian Henderson-Sellers and Don Firesmith. More information can be found at the OPEN Consortium website.

OPEN Publications

There have been several OPEN books published as well as numerous journal articles and conference papers.