Actionable Light-weight Process Guidance: approach, prototype, and industrial user study

Our work addresses software engineering organizations working in safety-critical fields who need rigorous processes with defined software quality assurance (QA) measures to ensure high-quality and safe engineering outputs. A significant challenge engineers face is following the correct process for their specific work context—understanding when steps are ready to begin, identifying any actions still needed to complete a step, and recognizing when rework is required. This paper introduces and evaluates ProGuide, a framework offering practical, lightweight process guidance by continually checking preconditions, postconditions, and QA constraints. When a violation occurs, it suggests concrete repair actions. Evaluations conducted on a safety-critical open-source system and with engineers from our industry partner ACME-Automotive demonstrated that ProGuide’s repair suggestions were comprehensive and limited in number, reducing both frustration and errors compared to having no process guidance.