Method Modifications in a Configuration Management Environment

Using configuration management (CM) within the method engineering discipline is a relatively new field of research (Greiffenberg, 2003; Saeki, 2006; Saeki & Oda, 2005). CM administrates revisions and variants of methods and provides a change process to control method modifications. Thus, method CM realizes the traceability of method changes, enables distributed method engineering and ensure a constantly high quality of engineered methods. In the past years, research focused on the development of appropriate method CM systems. The consequences of method modifications in such systems, however, have attained only little attention or were discussed only in a superficial way. As method modifications can lead to several problems (Weller & Esswein, 2006), it is important to know the consequences of such modifications to forecast the costs of a method change. Furthermore, this knowledge is useful to create or enhance appropriate CAME tools supporting (situational) method engineering. In this paper, we examine consequences of method modifications within configuration management. Thereby, we focus on the situational method engineering approach and the effects of method modifications on already instantiated models. We discuss critical modifications that lead to inconsistent models and analyze conditions for those problems.