The development of systems, e.g. software systems or embedded systems is in many cases a highly complex and voluminous task. In order to make its technical complexity and size more manageable, as well as to enable reliable control of quality, budget, and schedule, we break the development task down in smaller units, namely activities. Among the different activities and their work products we can determine various types of dependencies. These can for example be of structural, causal, temporal or conditional nature.

Our work on process meta-models is aiming at the definition of an uniform language for describing process models. We have been working on meta-models for process patterns for enabling a living software development process. Currently we work on the German V-Modell 200x, where our group's focus is providing the meta-model as well as the elaboration of several process module descriptions: project management, system and software development.