From Situational to Functional Method Engineering

The problem of selecting a good candidate method is a big issue in situational method engineering. We believe that the solution to this can be found not in the structure of a method itself but in the work to be done, the task to be performed by the method. We propose a method development life cycle with requirements, design and construction engineering stages. For the first, we propose the notion of a method intention, an abstraction of method functionality. At the Design stage we introduce the notion of method functionality and propose ‘method architecture’ to represent this functionality. Thus, method engineering becomes Functional Method Engineering (FME). A functionally close method architecture is selected, adapted, enhanced, restricted as needed. The task of construction handles the putting together of method features and structuring the method.