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124 HENDERSON-SELLERS
aligned to the personal and organizational cultures of the organization. In addition, SME provides
sufficient flexibility to support the valuable process of Software Process Improvement or SPI, as
advocated by, for example, CMMI or ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE).
SME suggests that the elements of one (or more) methodology can be modularized and en-
capsulated as “method fragments” (van Slooten and Hodes, 1996) and stored in a repository or
methodbase (e.g., Brinkkemper, 1996; Ralyté and Rolland, 2001). From the methodbase are then
extracted only those fragments relevant to the current situation. These fragments are then connected
together using “construction guidelines” to form the situational method(ology).
Ideally, the method fragments in the methodbase should all be instances of one of the concepts
captured in a metamodel underpinning the methodbase (Ralyté and Rolland, 2001; Henderson-
Sellers, 2003). The metamodel provides essentially a set of rules and prescriptive descriptions of
all of the kinds of method elements permissible within the methodbase.
The challenge for the method engineer, as noted above, is to select appropriate and compatible
fragments and to construct the final methodology (e.g., Wistrand and Karlsson, 2004). This may
be from scratch or as an extension to an existing methodology (Ralyté, Deneckère, and Rolland,
2003). Thus, construction guidelines (e.g., Brinkkemper, Saeki, and Harmsen, 1998; Klooster et
al., 1997; Ralyté and Rolland, 2001; Ralyté, Rolland, and Deneckère, 2004; Rolland, Prakash,
and Benjamen, 1999) are critical in the SME approach. Creating a project-specific methodology is
currently one of the more difficult and time-consuming jobs of the method engineering approach,
since the method engineer has to understand the methodology, the organization, the environment,
and the software project in order to select the appropriate fragments from the repository to use on
the project as well as to understand the rules of construction. Traditionally, this process is carried
out using predefined organizational requirements and the experience and knowledge of the method
engineer or process engineer (e.g., Fitzgerald, Russo, and O’Kane, 2003), although significant tool
support is likely in the near future (Saeki, 2003; Wistrand and Karlsson, 2004).

THE OPEN PROCESS FRAMEWORK: ITS USE IN AGENT-ORIENTED
METHOD ENGINEERING

One example of a method engineering approach that provides fragment support for both object-
oriented and agent-oriented methodological thinking is the OPEN Process Framework or OPF
(Firesmith and Henderson-Sellers, 2002; Henderson-Sellers, 2005). The OPF adopts a framework
3
approach based on an underpinning metamodel (Figure 8.2, page 132). Originally created to sup-
port object-oriented software development, the OPF methodbase (repository) has recently been
extended to include methodological support for agents (see, e.g., Debenham and Henderson-Sellers,
2003; Henderson-Sellers, 2005). As with any method engineering approach, OPF provides a re-
pository of method fragments offering direct as well as extensible support for the construction of
individually tailored (i.e., situational) methodologies for use in both industry and research environ-
ments. The current OPF repository contains many tens of method fragments for each metamodel
element—in total over 1,000 standardized fragments are available for the user.
To create a situational methodology, various method fragments are then chosen from the OO/
AO repository of the OPF and combined to describe the process, associated people and social
issues, deliverables, and so on. Using the tenets of SME outlined above, such a methodology
can be specifically constructed and tailored toward a specific project or a specific organizational
“standard” using the supplied construction guidelines together with a set of deontic matrices
(Figure 8.3, page 133). These matrices support the identification of fuzzy relationships between
pairs of method fragment types—for example, linkages between tasks and techniques. This gives