Metamodel of a System Development Method

Introduction The term ‘method’ is so commonly used in IT community in the context of software development that hardly any effort was ever made to define its semantic. With hundreds of methods with which to develop IT systems anything that looks like some kind of a software development process or architecture framework or even notation for a system modelling is called a ‘method’ (and sold as such) no matter how close it resembles one. With no strict definition or blueprint of a software development method itself, it’s difficult to assess a particular method in a systematic way. With established and emerging open standards such as UML notation for OO modelling [9] and OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [6, 10] the next logical step should be to define an open methodology metamodel that can provide a common framework to define any existing and new system development methodology. The benefits of such a framework will be significant and will include: • Common way of defining a methodology, which is widely understood in the IT community. • Common pattern with which vendors of methodology related products can show the value of their product to the client and the later one has a template for a particular methodology evaluation. • Easier mapping between different methodologies for the purpose of comparison, adopting or defining a new methodology or applying agile modelling approach [1]. The metamodel in question should be agile enough to accommodate the oldest, structured methods as well as object oriented development processes. The emerging breed of agile software development approaches should be able to find its way to apply the metamodel as easily, especially when it itself is aiming at becoming a kind of meta-method approach by combining various aspects and elements of the method spectrum. No matter how agile the process is meant to be, we need to define it first and having a consistent framework for that purpose will aid the task of both describing the process and maintaining it throughout an agile project life cycle. In this paper we introduce a methodology metamodel aimed to provide an open standard for defining system development methodology compliant with MDA. Defining high-level concept with the use of metamodels has been adopted by OMG and IT community and is accurately described by Metamodel Group [5]: “In this case, a metamodel allows a language designer or methodologist to better capture, analyse and understand what they are actually writing about in all those methodology books.”