Noesis: Towards a situational method engineering technique

Standard methods as such are not normally used for information system development. The particular circumstances of each project make it necessary to adapt the methods to deal with the situation at hand. This is the concern of situational method engineering, where the term situational method is used to refer to a method tailored to the needs of a particular development setting. Situational method engineering prescribes the performance of this method customization within the framework of a meta-modelling technique provided with mechanisms to manipulate methods (or fragments of them) for their modification, integration, adaptation or evolution. As a first step towards the definition of a situational method engineering technique, in this paper we propose the Noesis meta-modelling technique together with a complete and minimal family of transformations. The Noesis technique allows recursive and decompositional structures to be captured in the meta-models (which is a demandable requirement for meta-modelling techniques) and situational methods to be obtained by the assembly of method fragments. In addition, the family of transformations allows method fragment customization processes to be accomplished. The main contribution of this paper is the definition of this family and the proof of its completeness and minimality (which is an important open issue with respect to customization of method fragments), the Noesis technique being the scaffolding needed to show this.