A metamodel for defining development methodologies

Abstract

The concept of software product is often associated to software code; process documents are, therefore, considered as by-products. It is also often the case that customers demand first and foremost "results" leaving documentation in second place. Development efforts are then focused on code production at the expense of document quality and corresponding verification activities. As discussed within this paper, one of the root problems for this is that documentation in the context of methodologies is often described with insufficient level of detail. This paper presents a metamodel to address this problem. It is an extension of ISO/IEC 24744, the metamodel for methodologies development. Under this extension, documents can become the drivers of methodology activities. Documents will be the artifact which method engineers should focus on for methodology development, defining their structure and constraints. Developers will put their effort into filling sections of the documents as the way to progress in process execution; in turn, process execution will be guided by those documents defined by the method engineers. This can form the basis for a new approach to a Document-Centric Software Engineering Environment. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.