Assembly-based method engineering with method patterns

Abstract

Software development methods prescribe and coordinate the activities necessary to plan, build, and deliver software. To provide methods that account for the situational context of a development project, e.g., an acquirer-supplierrelationship or specific communication needs, the existing method creation approaches represent a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. On the one side, less flexible configurable methods offer a fixed set of configurations to quickly adapt a method to the situation at hand. On the other side, assembly-based approaches allow creating methods from scratch by combining preexisting building blocks. Thus, they are more flexible and capable of creating methods not covered by configurations of configurable methods, e.g., a mixture of agile and plan-driven ideas. However, assembly-based approaches are not easy to use and require considerable expert knowledge. In this paper we suggest the use of method patterns during the assembly-based method creation. Method patterns represent desirable principles for the to-be-method and therefore support the right choice and combination of method building blocks, simplifying assembly-based method creation.