Description and Manipulation of Method Fragments for the Assembly of SituationalMethods

摘要

This paper deals with the issue of assembly of project-specific or situationalmethods out of proven parts of existing information system (IS) development methods, so-called method fragments. The need to employ situational methods stems from the observation that standard IS development methods cannot anticipate adequately to new developments and are difficult to tune to specific situations. An overview of the entire process of situational method engineering is given, along with an architecture for the required computerized support tool. In assembling situational methods, we adopt a product-oriented viewpoint, taking the products to be delivered as a starting point for the processes required. After an introduction to the method fragment description language MEL, we describe a classification of method fragments, a layering, and a model containing the elementary building blocks of method fragments. A procedure for assembling method fragments is described.