An Approach for Evolution-Driven Method Engineering

Method Engineering emerged in the 90s as a discipline to design, construct and adapt methods, techniques and tools for the development of information systems. By executing a method step by step, users follow a systematic and well-defined way to attain the results which the method was created for. To support the creation of methods in a more guided and systematic way, a method framework can be used as a template, allowing one to benefit from the expertise of method engineers who regrouped their good practices in such frameworks. However, the creation and adoption of a method may be difficult if there is no tool to support these activities. In addition, method engineers may not have the programming skills to implement such a tool. In this context, we propose an approach inspired by the low-code paradigm for Method Engineering. The approach helps method engineers in creating new methods or adapting an already existing framework that integrates some construction rules for guidance. Our approach automatically provides tool support so that method experts can actually execute the method. This paper presents the approach through a proof of concept implementation, and a first empirical evaluation through semi-structured interviews.

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“…Approaches proposed in Method Engineering (ME) for the construction of a method are generally classified in [14,18]:…”

Section: Background and State Of The Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different approaches [4,2,9,18,14] have been proposed in ME to deal with the construction of new methods by adapting existing ones. However, for the best of our knowledge there are no tools to support the creation of methods based on these approaches, and such adaptation is mainly paper-based.…”

Section: Background and State Of The Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Supporting Method Creation, Adaptation and Execution with a Low-code Approach

Oliveira

Cortes-Cornax

Front

2023

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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Methodological Framework to Guide the Development of Continual Evolution Methods

Cela

Cortes-Cornax

Front

et al. 2019

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Companies live in a fast-changing environment imposing to constantly evolve in order to stay competitive. Such an evolution is carried out through continuous improvement cycles or radical changes often based on innovation that concern their products, their processes, their internal organization, etc. We refer to this situation as continual evolution. There are two implications of such continual evolution from our viewpoint: (a) the instillation of the "no end point" philosophy in organizations and (b) the use of methods based (1) on continual evolution cycles (by opposition to project-based approaches that have delimited budget and dates and) and, (2) on autonomous and collective implication of the organization's actors. This article presents a methodological framework, called As-Is/As-If framework to support method engineers in handling such continual evolution. The framework offers a process model and a product meta-model that are both reusable instruments, aiming to guide the construction of continual evolution methods. The process model and product meta-model can be seen as prototypical examples to be adapted in each situation at hand using heuristics proposed as part of the framework. The usefulness of the framework is illustrated through two methods adaptations.

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Finding Optimal Plans for Incremental Method Engineering

Vlaanderen

Dalpiaz

Brinkkemper

2014

Advanced Information Systems Engineering

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Incremental method engineering proposes to evolve the information systems development methods of a software company through a step-wise improvement process. In practice, this approach proved to be effective for reducing the risks of failure while introducing method changes. However, little attention has been paid to the important problem of identifying an adequate plan for implementing the changes in the company's context. To overcome this deficiency, we propose an approach that assists analysts by suggesting-via automated reasoning-optimal and quasi-optimal plans for implementing method changes. After formalizing the Process-Deliverable Diagrams language for describing the method changes to implement, we present a planning framework for generating plans that comply with different types of constraints. We also describe an implementation of the modeling and planning components of our approach.

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An Approach for Evolution-Driven Method Engineering

Cited by 7 publications

References 20 publications

Supporting Method Creation, Adaptation and Execution with a Low-code Approach

Supporting Method Creation, Adaptation and Execution with a Low-code Approach

Methodological Framework to Guide the Development of Continual Evolution Methods

Finding Optimal Plans for Incremental Method Engineering

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