A Meta-Method for Defining Software Engineering Methods

Today’s software systems demand for sophisticated software engineering processes and methods. Especially the globally distributed development of large software systems requires precise and documented methods, but also lightweight and agile methods need to have a precise foundation. Effort that is invested once in the methods can be systematically reused in projects. We describe MetaME, a meta-method for modeling and tailoring software engineering methods. It builds on a meta-model of software engineering concepts. MetaME combines ideas from meta-modeling and method engineering. The meta-method comprises a product dimension and a process dimension. When the meta-method is applied, software development concepts are paired with languages for their representation to form artifact types. In the process dimension of the software engineering method, software development tasks are described as operations that act upon the artifacts. These tasks are performed as activities in the method’s process workflow model. Tools can then be built that use the artifact model as the foundation of their repository structure and the task and workflow models as the basis for the supported functionality.