Method engineering: methods via methodology

The computer industry has largely ignored lessons from professional and engineering disciplines. They recognise there are layers of skill, areas of specialisation and levels of quality constraint. Though there exist proprietary interests, these are founded on an established framework for comparison of products and services in their domains of interest. The computer industry spends too much time debating the merits of proprietary products and has no equivalent framework within which products can be compared. The author describes an approach to improving quality of service in the computer industry by developing such a framework which can avoid domination of the comparison of products by commercial smokescreens