Enhancing Tool Support for Situational Engineering of Agile Methodologies in Eclipse

In recent years, with the growth of software engineering, agile software development methodologies have also grown substantially, replacing plandriven approaches in many areas. Although prominent agile methodologies are in wide use today, there is no method which is suitable for all situations. It has therefore become essential to apply Situational Method Engineering (SME) approaches to produce agile methodologies that are tailored to fit specific software development situations. Since SME is a complex process, and there is a vast pool of techniques, practices, activities, and processes available for composing agile methodologies, tool support–in the form of Computer Aided Method Engineering (CAME) environments–has become essential. Despite the importance of tool support for developing agile methodologies, available CAME environments do not fully support all the steps of method construction, and the need remains for a comprehensive environment. The Eclipse Process Framework Composer (EPFC) is an open-source situational method engineering tool platform, which provides an extensible platform for assembly-based method engineering in Eclipse. EPFC is fully extensible through provision of facilities for adding new method plug-ins, method packages, and libraries. The authors propose a plug-in for EPFC which enables method engineers to construct agile methodologies through an assembly-based SME approach. The plug-in provides facilities for the specification of the characteristics of a given project, selection of suitable agile process components from the method repository, and the final assembly of the selected method chunks, while providing a set of guidelines throughout the assembly process.