Representation of method fragments: A domain engineering approach

The discipline of situational method engineering (SME) promotes the idea of retrieving, adapting, and tailoring fragments, rather than complete methodologies, to specific situations. In order to succeed in creating good methodologies that best suit given situations, fragment representation and cataloguing are very important activities. We introduce a visual SME approach, whose roots are in domain engineering. This approach relies on the Application-based DOmain Modeling (ADOM) approach, which provides a framework for representing both applications and domains and validating them each against the other. Furthermore, the proposed ADOM-based approach aims at supporting all the SME-related activities, while in this paper we focus only on its fragment representation and cataloguing parts. The main advantages of the approach are its expressiveness, its support for specifying, constraining, and validating fragments and fragment types, its situational cataloguing abilities, and its accessibility to both software and method engineers.