Method architecture for situational method engineering

Abstract

Situational method engineering can be done using either method module based or intention-architecture, MIA, based approaches. The latter is organized in the three stages of requirements, design, and construction engineering. We focus here on elaborating the relationship between design and construction engineering of the MIA approach. The key concept in design engineering is that of method architecture. We define method architecture as an abstraction of the common properties of methods and propose a method architecture meta-model. At the construction engineering level, we represent a method as a method organisation. Method architecture can be implemented as one or more method organisations. We show that the MIA based approach is generic and can be used to engineer information systems development methods as well as business process models.