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A Mapping Study on Method Engineering — First Results
Marco Kuhrmann, Daniel Méndez Fernández, Michaela Tiessler
Technische Universität München – Software & Systems Engineering
Munich, Germany
{kuhrmann, mendezfe, tiessler}@in.tum.de
ABSTRACT
Context: Software processes have become inherently com-
plex to cope with the various situations we face in industrial
project environments. In response to this problem, the re-
search area of Method Engineering arose in the 1990s aiming
at the systematization of process construction. Objective:
Although the research area has gained much attention and
offered a plethora of contributions so far, we still have little
knowledge about the feasibility of Method Engineering. To
overcome this shortcoming, necessary is a systematic inves-
tigation of the respective publication flora. Method: We
conduct a systematic mapping study and investigate, inter
alia, which contributions were made over time and which
research type facet they address to distill a common under-
standing of the state-of-the-art. Results: Based on the re-
view of 64 publications, our results show that most of those
contributions only repeat and discuss formerly introduced
concepts, whereas empirically sound evidence on the feasi-
bility of Method Engineering, is still missing. Conclusion:
Although the research area constitutes many contributions,
yet missing are empirically sound investigations that would
allow for practical application and experience extraction.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
D.2.9 [Software Engineering Management]: Software
process models
General Terms
Exprimentation
Keywords
Situational Method Engineering, Mapping Study, System-
atic Literature Review
1. INTRODUCTION
Method Engineering arose as a research area in direct
response to the problem that industrial complex processes
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needed systematic adaptation. As there is no silver bul-
let in software processes that matches all possible needs of
projects, a number of authors voted for a flexible adaptation
approach [3, 18]. However, flexibility in software process de-
sign is, in general, a frequently discussed topic with a yet
missing common agreement.
During the past decades, a number of contributions on
(Situational) Method Engineering (SME, we use Method En-
gineering in this paper as a synonym) were published. Some
authors consider Method Engineering to be the “current
most optimistic route” to create flexible and adaptable soft-
ware processes [15]. Until today, however, it is still unknown
which of the available approaches has which practical im-
pact. We can observe selected studies on the application of
Method Engineering approaches, or discussions on the feasi-
bility of Method Engineering, e.g., [18, 15]. Yet, it remains
unclear what the exact state-of-the-art is w.r.t. the practical
application and the feasibility of Method Engineering.
Problem Statement. Although many contributions on
Method Engineering where proposed so far, it remains un-
clear which approaches are established in general and which
approaches are disseminated in practice. In other domains,
e.g., software process metamodels [33], there is reproducible
research. Comparable studies in the area of Method Engi-
neering are not yet available. If at all, studies stay on a
comparative level and do not allow for practical application
nor knowledge extraction. In summary, we still have little
knowledge about the finally established state-of-the-art.
Research Objective. To overcome the shortcoming stated
above, we aim at conducting a systematic investigation of
the publication flora in Method Engineering to paint a big
picture of the state-of-the-art.
Contribution. We contribute a systematic mapping study
and analyze which contributions were made over time and
of which research type facet those contributions are. This
analysis allows us to distill an initial understanding of the
maturity and the state of application of SME.
Outline. The remainder of the paper is organized as fol-
lows. In Sect. 2, we discuss work related. We introduce
the study design in Sect. 3, before discussing the results in
Sect. 4. In Sect. 5, finally, we conclude the paper.
2. RELATED WORK
Method Engineering (SME) is a paradigm, which addresses
the need for flexible and situation-specific methods and their
composition. In 1987, Basili and Rombach [3] fostered the
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discussion on more flexibility of software processes. The tai-
loring of a software process should address project goals and
environments. SME was proposed as a paradigm to allow for
more flexibility. Especially Brinkkemper [5, 4] and Harmsen
[11] provided fundamental research int this area. Based on
their research, e.g., Gonzales-Perez worked on the adapta-
tion of SME in software process metamodels [9]. Further-
more, several approaches using SME ideas were proposed,
e.g., to support methods’ authoring and design [27, 7, 26].
Today, several process frameworks, such as ISO 24744 [19]
claim to implement basic SME concepts.
However, although SME was proposed in the mid 1990’s
and there is a considerable number of contributions based
on SME ideas, there are only few studies dealing with ana-
lyzing the state-of-the-art and, in particular, the feasibility
when applying SME concepts in practice. In 1997 Hofst-
ede and Verhof [18] collected all information available for
this domain at the time, provided the first study, and stated
that “Much more empirical research is needed to substanti-
ate the claims associated with the potential benefits of situ-
ational method engineering.” They discussed the definition
of methods and method fragments, the selection of method
fragments, storage, formalisms, and the retrieval and the
assembly of method fragments. Taking into account that
SME was a rather “young” concept at this time, Hofstede
and Verhof provided a comprehensive collection of relevant
concepts and terms. However, their contribution is more
of philosophical nature as they discussed available concepts
rather than providing any research type classification for
those concepts. In 2009, Rolland [31] reviewed the state-of-
the-art and compared SME-related concepts and the termi-
nology used. This work should provide“a survey of the main
results obtained for the two issues of defining and assembling
[reusable method] components.” The survey stays, however,
philosophical and is similar to the one of Hofstede and Ver-
hof, which had no systematic literature review and/or classi-
fication of available contributions according to their research
type facets in scope. This also holds for Henderson-Sellers
and Ralyt´e [15] who continued the investigation of the state-
of-the-art analyses in 2010.
Existing studies do not provide reproducible reviews or a
classifications scheme. There is no study available that crit-
ically discusses the state-of-the-art in terms of which con-
cepts are defined and applied, and what are the experiences
in applying those concepts to allow for evaluating the feasi-
bility and the degree of dissemination of SME.
In this paper, we close the gap in the analyses of SME-
related contributions by providing a systematic mapping
study to revise the evolution of the respective publication
flora over time w.r.t. considered research type facets [35].
This allows us to draw a first picture about the maturity
and the practical feasibility of Method Engineering.
3. STUDY DESIGN
We design the study as a combination of methods used
for a systematic mapping study to structure the publication
flora and ones used for a systematic literature review (SLR)
to conduct an in-depth analysis of the publications (see also
Peterson et al. [25] and Kitchenham et al. [21]). The follow-
ing study design itself is structured according to Runeson et
al. [34]. After defining the research questions, we describe
the case selection. Finally, we describe how we collect and
analyze the data, before discussing the validity procedures.
3.1 Research Questions
Our overall goal is to elaborate the state-of-the-art in
SME. To this end, we formulate two research questions:
RQ 1 How many papers were published over the years?
RQ 2 Which research type facets address the contributions?
The first research question aims at investigating which pub-
lications were contributed in which year. This gives us the
opportunity to analyze particular trends in a quantitative
manner. The second research question aims at structur-
ing the contributions according to the research type facets
proposed by Wieringa et al. [35] to investigate whether the
contributions where of more conceptual nature or more em-
pirical nature. The classification of the research type in com-
bination with the year of publication rounds out the trend
analysis and needs an in-depth analysis whereby we consider
our study to be not exclusively a mapping study where we
classify the publications according to the abstracts and the
keywords, but need deeper insights to analyze the state of
evidence. One reason is that many contributions classified
by the authors as, for example, a “study” need more clarifi-
cation regarding the type of study, e.g., validation research
or evaluation research.
3.2 Case Selection
Peterson et al. [25] propose to initiate a mapping study
by (1) constructing the repository via a search of primary
(known) papers, (2) screen those papers for inclusion and
exclusion according to their relevance to the research ques-
tions, and (3) construct the classification scheme of the maps
according to the keywords and the abstracts. However, we
need a deviation from the standard procedure for two rea-
sons. First, inherent in the research area is that many contri-
butions cannot be allocated to a common area Method En-
gineering; for instance, many publications arise from other
research communities that investigate concepts of software
processes and tailoring of any facet, e.g., “organizational tai-
loring”, or “dynamic tailoring”. Those exemplary terms al-
ready show how the various interpretations of Method En-
gineering hamper the definition of the search strings and
the inclusion and exclusion criteria in advance. Second, we
deviate from the classic construction of the maps according
to the keywords proposed in the publications as we are es-
pecially interested in the research type facets of the papers
while following a pre-defined classification scheme that needs
to be analyzed independently from the given keywords.
For this reason, we refer to the case selection by follow-
ing a more pragmatic, yet more time-intensive procedure.
We first structure the publications and, thus, lay the foun-
dation for the search strings by following the principles of
snow-balling [21]. We use a primary set of publications and
manually search for secondary references that are based on
the contributions’ references sections to find further contri-
butions. This first step results in a set of standard contribu-
tions used for testing research questions, search strings, and
structuring the publications. For this primary search, we
refer to the selected authors and publications (Brinkkemper
[5, 4], Harmsen [11], Henderson-Sellers [16, 15], and Hofstede
[18]), which later on also serve as control values (the auto-
mated search result set has to contain the contributions of
those authors, see the previous section). The second step is
the automated search in several literature databases, which
we introduce in the following.
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The definitive version was published in the conference/workshop proceedings
3.3 Data Collection Procedures
The queries are built based on the keyword lists given by
the primary sources and most common terminology in the
area of software processes. As main data sources, we rely on
established literature databases, which we consider most ap-
propriate for a search. The internal discussion about which
databases to select is based on our experiences in the process
engineering domain. We select the following five databases:
ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, IEEE Digital Library,
Wiley, and Elsevier. If there is a paper listed in one of those
databases, but is only referred, we count it for the database
that generates the item, regardless of the actual publication
location. In addition to those databases, we also take papers
into account that are not referred by the databases, but have
to be considered as key contributions, e.g., the PhD thesis
of Harmsen [11]. For such contributions, we add a category
“misc”.
Query Definition. To define our queries, we take a sample
of relevant papers, analyze them in order to identify and iter-
atively refine the search strings, and validate them against a
pre-defined list reference authors (see Sect. 3.2). The initial
set of key words is: {software, development, process, tai-
loring, method, methodology, customization, customisation,
adaption, adaptation, ISO, CMMI, SPICE, standard, com-
pliance, study, experience, weaving, situational, engineering,
practice}.
Table 1: Final search strings used for query.
S1 (process or method or methodology) and (tailoring
or adaption or customization or customisation)
S2 process tailoring and (practice or experience or
study)
S3 method and (engineering or weaving) or situa-
tional method engineering
Based on the primary searches and the analysis of the
primary sources via snow-balling, we conclude the search
strings shown in Tab. 1. We use the search strings and
aforementioned literature databases for the data collection.
Each result set is transferred to a spreadsheet. Having the
single result sets available, all results are combined and used
as basis for the data analysis. For each data source, at most
the top 160 search results are taken into account.
3.4 Analysis Procedures
In the following, we describe our analysis procedure.
3.4.1 Analysis Preparation
To get the initial set of data to be analyzed, we perform
an automated search that requires us to filter and prepare
the result set. The data analysis is prepared by harmonizing
the data and performing a 3-staged voting process.
Harmonization. Since many contributions occur multiple
times or are out of scope, we first clean the result set by
eliminating multiple occurrences and eliminating contribu-
tions that not deal with computer science.
Voting. We perform a 3-staged voting process to classify
the papers as relevant or irrelevant and to build a set of con-
tributions for further investigation. The result sheet there-
fore contains three columns (attribute “relevance”). The first
two columns are used in the first voting stage (one column
per researcher). A cell in the column is filled either with 1
(the contribution is relevant) or 0. If a contribution is finally
rated with 2, it is automatically in the set of contributions
for further investigation. However, if a contribution is rated
with 0, it is excluded from further investigation. Only if a
contribution is rated with 1, it is marked to be judged in
the secondary voting. The criteria for the voting were (1)
the title of the contribution and (2) the abstract. In the
second voting stage, we only consider contributions that are
not finally decided and call in a third reviewer. This third
reviewer also works with the integrated table and votes by
following the same criteria as in the first voting stage. In
the third and last voting stage, we analyze the results of
the second stage, but extend the evaluation to the complete
contribution by further conducting an in-depth analysis of
the paper going beyond the title and the abstract. The goal
of this final stage is to figure out the key contributions on
SME that are relevant for the in-depth analyses.
3.4.2 In-depth Analysis
In the following, we summarize the analysis procedures
used to answer our research questions.
RQ 1 – Contributions over Time. To analyze which
contributions were made over time, we count the contribu-
tions and aggregate the results to clusters structured accord-
ing to the year of publication.
RQ 2 – Research Type Facets. We classify the contri-
butions according to the classification scheme proposed by
Wieringa et al. [35] and further applied by Peterson et al. [25]
to the context of systematic mapping studies. We refer to
the same structure as proposed by Peterson et al. [25]. We
classify the papers strictly according to the criteria given
by the scheme while allocating literature reviews and fur-
ther contributions in which existing concepts of SME are
re-organized, structured, and/or re-classified to the category
philosophical papers.
3.5 Validity Procedures
To increase the validity of our study, we refer to two par-
ticular procedures. First, we analyze the area of investiga-
tion in advance and conduct a snow-balling procedure to
infer and iteratively re-adjust the search strings. This in-
creases the construct and the external validity, since we per-
form our analysis on a small, but representative set of publi-
cations. Second, we refer to researcher triangulation within
a rigorous multi-staged voting procedure (Sect. 3.4.1) and
during the classification of the contributions according to
the research type facets. The voting procedure allows us to
select the relevant papers from the irrelevant ones and to
classify them appropriately. This procedure is accompanied
by an in-depth analysis of the contents of the papers going
beyond the abstracts, which we see as necessary as SME still
remains a multi-facetted area with various interpretations in
the provided concepts and the used terminology.
4. RESULTS
In the following, we summarize our results and structure
them according to the research questions. For each result
set, we conclude with a short interpretation. Table 2 sum-
marizes the set of the papers resulting from the collection
and preparation phases. We summarize the databases, the
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The definitive version was published in the conference/workshop proceedings
total number of results, the cleaned number of results after
removing duplicates, and after the multi-staged voting of the
papers for their relevance. Due to space limitations, the ref-
erence section of this short paper only lists the contributions
used in the following discussion.
Table 2: Summarized search results.
Database Total Clean Voting Relevant
ACM 210 210 44 14
Springer 60 60 18 18
IEEE
210 210 22 11
Wiley 1120 381 43 5
Elsevier 50 50 23 12
Misc 4
P
1650 911 150 64
4.1 Contributions over Time (RQ 1)
To answer research question 1 we analyze the contribu-
tions classified in Tab. 2 as relevant for the years of publica-
tion. Figure 1 (upper part) shows the plot of the distribution
from 1985 until 2012. The plot shows the first contribution
by Basili and Rombach [3] in 1987, a first peak in the time
slot 1995-1998, a second peak in 2001 that is followed by a
stable number of contributions, and, finally, a third peak in
2007. The first peak is represented by the initial contribu-
tions, e.g., of Brinkkemper or Hamsen. The second peak is
mainly given by contributions of Ralyt´e et al. (e.g., [30, 28]),
and contributions that discuss opportunities for particular
applications of SME concepts, e.g., the ones of [17, 2, 8]. We
also find contributions that directly discussed the emerging
agile methods and how SME could serve agile development
(e.g., [12, 20]). The third and largest peak was in 2007 and
points to a stronger effort of the SME community, reflected
in publications like [1, 9, 24]), while we could find no publi-
cation at all in 2011 and so far in 2012.
Interpretation. We interpret the series of publications
over time as follows: The initiation of first discussions about
the need for adoption of software processes seems to be trig-
gered by Basili and Rombach in 1987. Seven years later,
Brinkkemper initiated first conceptual contributions on this
area in 1995 and baptized the research area with the term
method engineering. His conceptual work was followed by
Harmsen’s contributions related to his PhD work. The next
serious peak in the number of publications is in 2001, which
seems to be triggered by the release of the agile manifesto
being signed the same year. Also, the release of the OPEN
process framework [10, 14] as well as the release of the Soft-
ware Engineering Metamodel for Development Methodolo-
gies (SEMDM, ISO 24744 [19, 9]) further seems to have fos-
tered further discussions and work in the area of method en-
gineering summarized in a joint proceeding [29], after which,
finally, the number of publications abruptly ended indicating
the problem domain to be sufficiently explored and practi-
cally applicable concepts to be disseminated.
4.2 Research Type Facets (RQ 2)
To answer research question 2, we create, as a first step,
a tag cloud to get a first impression about the concepts and
terms most frequently used. As a second step, we create a
map of the number of contributions over time and their clas-
sification according to the research type facets (see Fig. 1,
lower part). The tag cloud, for reasons of space limitations
not included in the paper, reveals the terms study and prac-
tice to be encountered 14 times each, the term approach 38
times, and the term propose 35 times.
In the contribution set were, however, only three experi-
ence papers, two evaluation papers, four validation papers,
and one opinion paper. We classified the majority of the
contributions as philosophical papers (18 papers) or solu-
tion proposals (36).
Interpretation. During the classification of the publica-
tions according to the research type facets, we expected the
terms study, practice, and experiences to indicate to a cer-
tain evolution of the concepts also reflected in the research
type facets, i.e. we first expect opinion papers, followed by
solution proposals, validation and evaluation research, and
finally experience reports. This expectation furthermore was
manifested by the last peak in the publications shown in
Fig. 1 after which only few contributions were made, thus,
suggesting an increased knowledge about the practical suit-
ability of the proposed concepts made during validation and
evaluation research and the dissemination of the concepts
into practice.
The result set, however, does not contain the amount of
empirical studies we would expect. Our classification re-
veals that most of the work remained to be of conceptual
and philosophical nature where existing concepts were dis-
cussed from different angles. Starting from 2001—about 5
years after the first conceptual contributions were made by
Brinkkemper and Harmsen—we see a large number of solu-
tion papers in which same or similar concepts are transferred
to different domains, e.g., for the domain of agile methods
[12] or requirements engineering [6]. Further contributions
“rethink” the notion of SME [28, 32] or propose the imple-
mentation of SME concepts into software process metamod-
els [12, 9], but still remain without empirical evidence on
the feasibility of the contributed concepts.
Even those contributions on the evaluation of SME [18,
13, 31, 15] do not provide any empirical evaluation going be-
yond philosophical discussions or, to some extent, isolated
controlled experiments that are not generalizable nor rep-
resentative due to the sensitive context in which software
processes are applied. Therefore, our conclusion is that the
research area remains at the level of solution proposals.
5. CONCLUSION
This paper closes a gap in the SME literature by con-
ducting a systematic mapping study to develop a notion of
the state-of-the-art in SME without going into conceptual,
methodical, and technical details and discussions. Our re-
sults already show that SME is still an emerging field with
many ideas and concepts competing for the favor of process
engineers and process users. However, our data also shows
missing empirical evidence on the feasibility of SME. Among
64 rigorously selected papers, only 9 papers could be clas-
sified as experience reports (3), validation research (4), or
evaluation research (2). The majority of the analyzed con-
tributions was classified as papers of philosophical nature
(18 out of 64) or as pure solution proposal (36 out of 64).
Relation to existing Evidence. Existing studies by Hof-
stede and Verhof [18], Rolland [31], and Henderson-Sellers
© ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in the conference/workshop proceedings
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Figure 1: Number of contributions over time and structured according to research type facets.
and Ralyt´e [15] focus on collecting and summarizing SME
knowledge. The systematization in this study shows a gap
between the contributors’ self-conception and the classifica-
tion that is based on the research type facets.
The study at hands does not aim at collecting detailed in-
formation about SME concepts and techniques. In contrast
to the existing studies, the study at hands aims at providing
a first systematization of the SME domain. Therefore, this
study combines techniques for conducting mapping studies
and systematic literature reviews to investigate the entire
domain and to systematize the SME publication flora in gen-
eral.
Impact/Implications. At first, variability in software pro-
cesses—in terms of design, implementation, and manage-
ment as well as of their project-specific tailoring—remains
an open issue. Although the agile community propagates
minimalistic approaches, practice shows that there is a need
for rich and structured software processes. Method Engi-
neering is a promising approach to allow for more flexibility
over the entire software process life cycle. Furthermore, en-
actment of software processes [22] remains an only partially
solved issue for which SME provides promising concepts.
Our research shows the need for further discussions on SME,
especially the need for building a knowledge base compris-
ing concrete experiences. When developing/refining SME
concepts, a sound data/knowledge base is required to align
SME with concrete requirements.
Second, our research also shows that although SME con-
cepts were contributed to standards for software process
metamodels, those SME parts stayed, to a large extent, ne-
glected. The SME community thus needs to foster a critical
discourse on the appropriateness of the initial SME concepts
and whether there is potential for improvement to highlight
the advantages.
Limitations. This paper aims at creating a first big pic-
ture and, thus, has some limitations. Deeper insights and
analyses w.r.t. conceptual, methodical, and technical aspects
of SME are not part of this study. Furthermore, this study
does not aim at creating taxonomies or generalized concepts.
This study does also not provide any solution or improve-
ment proposal, as the scope was to systematize the SME
publication flora and to illustrate a picture of the state-of-
the-art of the SME domain.
Future Work. The findings of this study show the need
for further investigation: Although existing studies collected
much knowledge in the area of SME and several standards
(partially) implement SME concepts, an agreed taxonomy,
and consequently an agreed modeling approach, of SME is
still missing. Especially concepts such as artifact orienta-
tion [23] are, if at all, only rudimentary noted. Further
research needs to construct a sound theory of Method Engi-
neering w.r.t. state-of-the-art concepts in Software Engineer-
ing
1
and synthesize those concepts with method engineering,
e.g., by implementing an artifact-oriented method engineer-
ing in software process metamodels such as SPEM. Based on
such a theory, we can evidently evaluate the feasibility—in
software process design as well as in software process use—
and provide an empirically sound basis to conduct proper
validation research and infer valid and relevant improvement
goals.
Acknowledgment
We want to thank Olena Stute for her work on the initial
investigation to figure out the key contributions on SME.
We also want to thank Georg Kalus for fruitful discussions
on previous versions of this paper and for the support during
the analyses of the publications.
1
For instance the SEMAT initiative: http://semat.org
© ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.
The definitive version was published in the conference/workshop proceedings
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