Connecting method engineering knowledge: a community based approach

Current practices in the field of information system development reveal a crucial need for spreading and sharing methodological knowledge in addition to existing proposals about formalizing, building and tailoring methods. Currently, the methodological knowledge is mostly shared and spreaded inside an organization by organizing training sessions, attending to conferences and reading manuals. Moreover, it is not very interactive and do not provide efficient support for evolution. The methodological knowledge under consideration ranges from very formal descriptions to informal experience report, empirical knowhow and best practices. But in reality, feedbacks about methods in practice are most of the time neither captured nor integrated to the corporate knowledge. And finally, method bases which have been developed to store predefined method fragments to support method tailoring inside organizations have not been very successful in the industrial context. For all these reasons we propose an approach to share and spread methodological knowledge based on the concept of community of practice. Our proposal aims at supporting exchange of knowledge outside of the boundaries of the organization and deepens members knowledge and expertise about methodological knowledge by interacting on an ongoing basis. In this paper, we focus on the lightweight top ontology we propose to specify the core concepts required to qualify any piece of knowledge about method.