Rébecca Deneckère

Towards a generic model for situational method engineering

The work presented in this paper is related to the area of Situational Method Engineering (SME) which focuses on project-specific method construction. We propose a generic process model supporting the integration of different existing SME approaches. This model shall help the method engineer either selecting one SME approach or combining several approaches that best fit the situation of the method engineering project at hand. The generic model presented in this paper already contains three SME techniques: (1) to assemble method chunks (2) to extend an existing method and (3) to generate a method by abstraction/instantiation of a model/meta-model. The paper presents and illustrates these three techniques and show how other SME techniques could be integrated in the model.

Method Chunks Selection by Multicriteria Techniques: an Extension of the Assembly-based Approach

The work presented in this paper is related to the area of situational method engineering (SME). In this domain, approaches are developed accordingly to specific project specifications. We propose to adapt an existing method construction process, namely the assembly-based one. One of the particular features of assembly-based SME approach is the selection of method chunks. Our proposal is to offer a better guidance in the retrieval of chunks by the introduction of multicriteria techniques. To use them efficiently, we defined a typology of projects characteristics, in order to identify all their critical aspects, which will offer a priorisation to help the method engineer in the choice between similar chunks.

Towards a meta-tool for change-centric Method engineering: A typology of generic operators

The work presented in this paper considers how Method Engineering (ME) helps in method changes that are required by Information Systems (IS) changes. In fact, ME provides different approaches allowing to construct situation- specific methods by adapting, extending, improving existing methods or by assembling method components. All these approaches use a set of operations to realize these method changes. Our objective in this paper is to provide a meta- tool for change-centric ME which takes the form of a typology of generic ME operators. The operators for each specific ME approach are instantiated from the generic ones. The paper illustrates and discusses the instantiation of the generic typology for two assembly-based ME approaches.

Engineering Methods in the Service-Oriented Context

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on Method Engineering, ME 2011, held in Paris, France, in April 2011. The 13 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented together with the abstracts of two keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on situated method engineering, method engineering foundations, customized methods, tools for method engineering, new trends to build methods, and method engineering services.

Decision-making ontology for information system engineering

Information Systems (IS) engineering (ISE) processes contain steps where decisions must be made. Moreover, the growing role of IS in organizations involves requirements for ISE such as quality, cost and time. Considering these aspects implies that the number of researches dealing with decision-making (DM) in ISE increasingly grows. As DM becomes widespread in the ISE field, it is necessary to build a representation, shared between researchers and practitioners, of DM concepts and their relations with DM problems in ISE. In this paper, we present a DM ontology which aims at formalizing DM knowledge. Its goal is to enhance DM and to support DM activities in ISE. This ontology is illustrated within the requirements engineering field.

Supervised intentional process models discovery using Hidden Markov models

Since several decades, discovering process models is a subject of interest in the Information System (IS) community. Approaches have been proposed to recover process models, based on the recorded sequential tasks (traces) done by ISs actors. However, these approaches only focused on activities and the process models identified are, in consequence, activity-oriented. Intentional process models focus on the intentions underlying activities rather than activities, in order to offer a better guidance through the processes. Unfortunately, the existing process-mining approaches do not take into account the hidden aspect of the intentions behind the recorded user activities. We think that we can discover the intentional process models underlying user activities by using Intention mining techniques. The aim of this paper is to propose the use of probabilistic models to evaluate the most likely intentions behind traces of activities, namely Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We focus on this paper on a supervised approach that allows discovering the intentions behind the user activities traces and to compare them to the prescribed intentional process model.

Patterns for Extending an OO Model with Temporal Features

We identify a set of generic patterns which can be used to introduce temporal features in existing OO models. Patterns are generic in the sense that they are applicable to any OO model having the basic features of class, attribute, domain and class association. The paper shows the application of these patterns to the O* model.

Process Mining Versus Intention Mining

Process mining aims to discover, enhance or check the conformance of activity-oriented process models from event logs. A new field of research, called intention mining, recently emerged. This field has the same objectives as process mining but specifically addresses intentional process models (processes focused on the reasoning behind the activities). This paper aims to highlight the differences between these two fields of research and illustrates the use of mining techniques on a dataset of event logs, to discover an activity process model as well as an intentional process model.

Method Families Concept: Application to Decision-Making Methods

The role of variability in Software engineering grows increasingly as it allows developing solutions that can be easily adapted to a specific context and reusing existing knowledge. In order to deal with variability in the method engineering (ME) domain, we suggest applying the notion of method families. Method components are organized as a method family, which is configured in the given situation into a method line. In this paper, we motivate the concept of method families by comparing the existing approaches of ME. We detail then the concept of method families and illustrate it with a family of decision-making (DM) methods that we call MADISE.

Contextualization of method components

Method Engineering (ME) for Information Systems (IS) is a response to the necessity to better fit methods with development activities requirements. Situational method engineering allows defining new methods constructed on the fly following the situation at hand. However, in the reviewed literature, the situation is not always described and there is no proposed approach to handle the specific context of method components. This paper provides a detailed vision of context and a process for contextualizing methods in the IS domain. Our proposal is illustrated with a case study of project portfolio management in the domain of IT governance.