Traditional management practice of software development sees the development process as
something that must be planned and controlled in order to reliably achieve the planned result.
The underlying assumption is that the process can in fact be controlled and that this is beneficial
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to the outcome of the process. In its extreme form, this belief has been formulated by Osterweil
in his famous ICSE 9 keynote speech on software development processes: software processes are
software too [Osterweil1987]. His keynote suggests that developers execute processes much like
computers execute software applications. This approach has given rise to research in software
process modeling and enactment that is still going on today. The underlying assumption that humans
execute processes much like machines has found its way into current terminology and
thinking. As a recent example, Pohl et al. write of developers as being guided by tools and as performing
processes [Pohl+1999].