Method engineering: towards methods as services

Method engineering has emerged as the result of the necessity to adapt methods to better fit the needs of the development task at hand. Its aim is to provide techniques for retrieving reusable method components, adapting and assembling these together to form the new method. The paper provides a survey of the main results obtained for the two issues of defining and assembling components. It argues, thereafter, that the full power of method components can be widely exploited by moving to the notion of method services. The paper finally outlines a possible approach towards Method as a Service (MaaS), and illustrates it. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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