Agile Service Development: A Rule-Based Method Engineering Approach

Agile software development has evolved into an increasingly mature software development approach and has been applied successfully in many software vendors’ development departments. In this position paper, we address the broader agile service development. Based on method engineering principles we define a framework that conceptualizes an operational way of working for the development of services, emphatically taking into account agility. As a first level of agility, the framework contains situational project factors that influence the choice of method fragments; secondly, increased agility is proposed by describing and operationalizing these method fragments not as imperative steps or activities, but instead by means of sets of minimally specified, declarative rules that determine the context and constraints within which goals are to be reached. This approach borrows concepts from rules management, organizational patterns, and game design theory.