  The development of high-quality software or software-intensive systems
requires custom-tailored process models that fit the organizational and project
goals as well as the development contexts. These models are a necessary
prerequisite for creating project plans that are expected to fulfill business
goals. Although project planners require individual process models
custom-tailored to their constraints, software or system developing
organizations also require generic processes (i.e., reference processes) that
capture project-independent knowledge for similar development contexts. The
latter is emphazised by assessment approaches (such as CMMI, SPICE) that
require explicit process descriptions in order to reach a certain capability or
maturity level. Among other concepts such as polymorphism, templates, or
generator-based descriptions, software process patterns are used to describe
generic process knowledge. Several approaches for describing the architecture
of process patterns have already been published (e.g., [7]). However, there is
a lack of descriptions on how to compose process patterns for a specific
decelopment context in order to gain a custom-tailored process model for a
project. This paper focuses on the composition of process patterns in a
goal-oriented way. First, the paper describes which information a process
pattern should contain so that it can be used for systematic composition.
Second, a composition method is sketched. Afterwards, the results of a
proof-of-concept evaluation of the method are described. Finally, the paper is
summarized and open research questions are sketched.
