It is commonly agreed that software developments methods must be defined (or adapted) in-house in order to meet the particular needs of the organizations where they are to be applied. To help meet this challenge, Method Engineering research aims to provide solutions to efficiently deal with the definition and adaptation of methods, and the construction of the supporting software tools. However, while the product part of methods is fully considered by most Method Engineering approaches, the specification and enactment of the process part is less well-supported. To fill this gap, this work presents a methodological Methodd Engineering approach and a Computer-Aided Method Engineering (CAME) environment (MOSKitt4ME) that support the design and implementation of the process part of methods in the context of Model-Driven Engineering.

1. Mario Cervera, Manoli Albert, Victoria Torres, Vicente Pelechano
The MOSKitt4ME Approach:
Providing Process Support in a Method
Engineering Context

2. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

3. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

4. Motivation
Method Engineering
The engineering discipline to design, construct and
adapt methods, techniques and tools for the
development of information systems
(Sjaak Brinkkemper, 1996)

5. Motivation
Method Engineering
The engineering discipline to design, construct and
adapt methods, techniques and tools for the
development of information systems
(Sjaak Brinkkemper, 1996)
 Proposals
– Brinkkemper
– Karlsson
– Ralyté
– Henderson-Sellers
– …
 Tools (CAME)
– Decamerone
– MC Sandbox
– Method Editor
– …

6. Motivation
Method Engineering
The engineering discipline to design, construct and
adapt methods, techniques and tools for the
development of information systems
(Sjaak Brinkkemper, 1996)
 Proposals
– Prakash
– Tolvanen
– …
 Tools (metaCASE)
– MERU
– MetaEdit+
– MetaMOOSE
– …

7. Motivation
Method Engineering
The engineering discipline to design, construct and
adapt methods, techniques and tools for the
development of information systems
(Sjaak Brinkkemper, 1996)
 Limitations
– Few proposals support both design and implementation of methods
– Slow industry adoption of Method Engineering approaches

8.  Support to design and implementation of methods
Motivation
4ME
 Implemented in the context of Eclipse
 Use of standards
 Use of Model-Driven Development techniques

9. – ITEA 2 Project
• Open Platform for the Engineering of Embedded Systems (OPEES)
• Partners:
– Public Administration
 Real application contexts
Motivation
4ME
…

10. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

11. Problem Statement
 Methods are mainly composed of:
ImplementationDesign Validation
Designer Developer Tester
Application Model
IDE JUnit
Process part of the method
– Roles
– Products
– Tools
– WorkFlow
– Anything needed for software development …
– Work Units

12. Problem Statement
 Limited process support in Method Engineering
Workflow specification
Executability
Software support
BPMN 2.0
Activiti Engine
MOSKitt4ME
4ME

13. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

14. Proposed Solution

15. Proposed Solution

16. Proposed Solution
 Objective: Construction of the method
model
 How: by instantiation from the SPEM 2.0
meta-model
– from scratch
– reusing method fragments

17. Proposed Solution
 Objective: Specification of the technological
details of the method
 How: Reusable assets are associated to the
method elements
– These assets contain software tools that
support the method elements during
execution

18. Proposed Solution
 Objective: Definition of an executable
representation of the process
 How: by instantiation from the BPMN 2.0
meta-model
– A M2M transformation automates the
construction of the initial model

19. Proposed Solution

20. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

21. The MOSKitt4ME Tool
DEMO

22. Agenda
 Motivation
 Problem Statement
 Proposed Solution
 The MOSKitt4ME Tool
 Conclusions

23. Conclusions
 Slow industry adoption of Method Engineering approaches
– High complexity? Lack of adequate tool support? Lack of
automation?
 MOSKitt4ME tries to alleviate these problems
– Use of MDD
– Use of standards
– Takes advantage of the big community behind the Eclipse project
– Takes advantage of the benefits provided by process modeling

24. Conclusions
 Future work
– Variability support to deal with dynamic nature of projects
– Evaluation of MOSKitt4ME
 More information at:
http://users.dsic.upv.es/~mcervera/moskitt4me/

25. Mario Cervera, Manoli Albert, Victoria Torres, Vicente Pelechano
The MOSKitt4ME Approach:
Providing Process Support in a Method
Engineering Context