Towards Tool Support for Situational Engineering of Agile Methodologies

Various agile software development methodologies, practices, and techniques have been proposed in the last decade, some present novel ideas, while many are simply made up of tasks and techniques borrowed from prominent agile methodologies. Each of these methodologies prescribes a set of practices and techniques which are deemed appropriate for application in a specific context. However, there exists no single method which fits all project situations. This has resulted in the advent of Situational Method Engineering (SME) approaches, which are used for developing software methodologies that are tailored to fit the specific circumstances of the project situation at hand. Since tool support has become an essential prerequisite for widespread adoption of software engineering methods, provision of Computer-Aided Method Engineering (CAME) tools has become a priority. We provide a basis for the application of assembly-based situational method engineering to the development of bespoke agile methodologies. To this aim, a comprehensive set of relevant methodology features has first been identified, spanning the range of possible requirements that a method engineer may define for the agile methodology under development. Based on this set of requirements, a method base has been proposed that contains the method chunks necessary for satisfying these requirements. The proposed method base conforms to the Software Process Engineering Metamodel (SPEM 2.0), and can be immediately plugged into CAME tools which implement this metamodel, including the Eclipse Process Framework Composer (EPFC).