Developing Families of Method-Oriented Architecture

Abstract

Abstract. The method engineering paradigm is motivated by the need for software development methods suitable for specific situations and requirements of organizations in general and projects in particular. Assembly-based method engineering, as one of the prominent approaches in method engineering, creates project-specific methods by (re-)using method components, specified with method processes and products, and stored in method repositories. This paper tries to address the two challenges of assembly-based method engineering related to more effective: i) publication and sharing of method components; and ii) management of variability in software methods, which have many commonalties. In order to address these two challenges, we propose the concept of Families of Method-Oriented Architectures. This concept is built on top of the principles of service-oriented architectures and software product lines.

Towards a Method Family Supporting Information Services Co-Creation in the Transdisciplinary Context

“…According to Ralyté et al (2003), the assembly-based situational method construction is composed of three steps: (1) method requirements specification, (2) method chunks selection and (3) assembly of selected method chunks into a complete and coherent method. The method family engineering approach introduced in Asadi et al (2011) starts by the phase named method family scoping which is followed by method family requirements analysis and method family realization phases. In our work we combine these two approaches in the following way: we start with the method family scoping adapted from Asadi et al (2011), then we follow with the method family requirements specification, method chunk selection for the method family and method chunks assembly as proposed in Ralyté et al (2003):…”

“…The method family engineering approach introduced in Asadi et al (2011) starts by the phase named method family scoping which is followed by method family requirements analysis and method family realization phases. In our work we combine these two approaches in the following way: we start with the method family scoping adapted from Asadi et al (2011), then we follow with the method family requirements specification, method chunk selection for the method family and method chunks assembly as proposed in Ralyté et al (2003):…”

“…The notion of method family (Rolland, 2007;Asadi et al, 2011) was introduced as a new approach for situation-specific method engineering allowing to capture the variability of system engineering situations and corresponding techniques into one model that could be easily configured into a particular method line according to the situation at hand. In our case, the concept of method family allows us to cope with the multiplicity of service engineering situations and to offer the possibility to define a particular and configurable method line for each well-defined situation.…”