An Approach for Method Reengineering

The increasing complexity of the Information Systems (IS) asks for new IS development methods constructed ‘on the fly’ to be adapted to the specific situations of the projects at hand. Situational Method Engineering responds to this need by offering techniques to construct methods by assembling reusable method fragments stored in some method repository. For method engineering to be performed it is necessary to build method bases. In this paper we propose an approach supporting the reengineering of existing methods. The reengineering process leads to the representation of an existing method in a modular fashion i.e. as a set of reusable method chunks, easy to retrieve and to assemble one the others. Once the method chunks are stored in a method repository they can be assembled in different manners to construct new methods. The emphasis of this paper is on the guidance provided by the method reengineering process model. The approach is exemplified with the OOSE reengineering case study.