Developing Semantically-Enabled Families of Method-Oriented Architectures

Method Engineering (ME) aims to improve software development methods by creating and proposing adaptation frameworks whereby methods are created to provide suitable matches with the requirements of the organization and address project concerns and fit specific situations. Therefore, methods are defined and modularized into components stored in method repositories. The assembly of appropriate methods depends on the particularities of each project, and rapid method construction is inevitable in the reuse and management of existing methods. The ME discipline aims at providing engineering capability for optimizing, reusing, and ensuring flexibility and adaptability of methods; there are three key research challenges which can be observed in the literature: 1) the lack of standards and tooling support for defining, publishing, discovering, and retrieving methods which are only locally used by their providers without been largely adapted by other organizations; 2) dynamic adaptation and assembly of methods with respect to imposed continuous changes or evolutions of the project lifecycle; and 3) variability management in software methods in order to enable rapid and effective construction, assembly and adaptation of existing methods with respect to particular situations. The authors propose semantically-enabled families of method-oriented architecture by applying service-oriented product line engineering principles and employing Semantic Web technologies.