Representation of Method Fragments: A Comparative Study1

The discipline of situational method engineering promotes the idea of retrieving and adapting fragments, rather than complete methodologies, to specific situations. In order to succeed in creating good methodologies that best suit given situations, fragment representation and cataloguing are very important activities. This paper presents and compares three existing approaches to fragment representation. It further provides a set of evaluation criteria for comparing fragment representation approaches. These criteria include expressiveness, consistency, formalism, situational cataloguing, adaptability and flexibility to changes, comprehensibility, and connectivity. Based on this comparison, we introduce a new visual approach that combines the benefits of the three reviewed approaches and attempts to overcome their limitations. This approach relies on a specific domain engineering method, called Application-based DOmain Modeling (ADOM), which enables specification of fragments at various levels of details, specification of fragment types and their constraints, and validation of specific fragments against their relevant fragment types. All these activities are done using a well known modeling language (UML), increasing user accessibility (and consequently comprehensibility).