Special Issue on New Trends in Situational Method Engineering

INTRODUCTION Over the last two decades the discipline of Method Engineering (ME) has evolved from simple ad-hoc method construction to situ-ational and domain-specific method engineering as a response to the increasing complexity and diversity of Information Systems Developments (ISD). Nowadays, the evolution of enterprise software and information systems from complex and monolithic systems towards distributed, modular and service-oriented ones creates again a strong need to rethink the fundamentals of ISD methods and to realign them with the new information and software systems engineering practice. The need for situation-specific, flexible , adaptable and agile ISD methods is undeniable. As a reaction to this need, the discipline of Situational Method Engineering (SME) aims to provide techniques and tools for " on the fly " method construction, configuration and tailoring according to the ISD project characteristics and requirements. On the other hand, even though enterprises acknowledge that methods, well adapted to the enterprise needs and engineering situations, bring a real added value to their development projects, they are rather slow to adopt the approaches and techniques proposed by SME researchers. They argue that SME processes are time consuming and too expensive in terms of knowledge and resources needed to implement them in practice, and demand more simple SME approaches and tools, preferably available on-line, easy to implement and not requiring extensive knowledge in ME. For that reason, new concepts and approaches are constantly emerging in the field. We can mention the notions of method as a service, method-oriented architecture and method family which aim to improve method knowledge sharing and reusability and to facilitate the composition and configuration of situation-specific methods. The innovation in and promotion of the SME discipline and the application of its results in practice seem to be vital to the IFIP WG 8.1 Task Group on Method Engineering. In recognition of this, the 4 th Working Conference on Situational Method Engineering was organized in Paris, France, April 2011 by this research group. The aim of this conference was to review the latest achievements and to identify the new trends in the field. This special issue comprises a selection of revised and extended papers from that conference. The selection of papers was based on their quality and also on the novelty of the contribution to the domain of SME. Introduced in early nineties by Kumar and Welke (1992) the idea of constructing methods " on the fly " according to …