Situational method engineering: combining assembly-based and roadmap-driven approaches

  • Authors:

  • Isabelle Mirbel;Jolita Ralyté

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratoire I3S, Les Algorithmes, BP 121, Route des Lucioles, 06903, Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France;Centre Universitaire d’Informatique, Université de Genève, BP 121, 24 rue du Général Dufour, CH-1211, Genève 4, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Requirements Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Because the engineering situation of each information system development (ISD) project is different, engineering methods need to be adapted, transformed or enhanced to satisfy the specific project situation. Contributions, in the field of situational method engineering (SME), aim at providing techniques and tools allowing to construct project-specific methods instead of looking for universally applicable ones. In addition to the engineering method tailoring, necessary to fit the project situation, a customization of the engineering method for each engineer participating in the project is also required. Such a configuration allows a better understanding of the method by focusing on guidelines related to the project engineer’s daily tasks. It also increases his/her involvement in the ISD method realization. To achieve this twofold objective (ISD method tailoring and customization), we propose a framework for SME combining an assembly-based approach for project-specific method construction and a roadmap-driven approach for engineer-specific method configuration. The first step of our process provides support to build a new method that is most suitable for the current ISD project situation, whereas the second step aims at choosing the most adapted path (roadmap) to satisfy the requirements of a particular project engineer within the project-specific method. The two core elements of our SME framework are the method chunks repository and the reuse frame. The former concerns reusable method components definition and storage whereas the latter deals with the characterization of the project situation and the project engineer’s profile. In this paper we start first by presenting our SME framework and its core elements: the method chunk repository and the reuse frame. Then we show how to take advantage of them through our two-step process combining assembly-based method construction and roadmap-driven method configuration.