Method Engineering: A Service-Oriented Approach - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 334

2.3 Benefits of the Service Paradigm in Method Engineering
We consider that the service paradigm defined according the five principles pre-
sented in Sect. 2.2 has several advantages with regards to method engineering.
Key to the service concept is the service-oriented architecture (SOA) that sup-
ports a logical way of designing systems by providing services to end-users requests
or to other services via published and discoverable interfaces. For our concern, this
idea suggests to provide and capitalize method fragments constructed by individu-
als and distributed outside of any one particular organization and then to share and
reuse method fragments. By considering methods and method fragments as avail-
able services, they are (web) resources accessible by a wide range of developers
who need methods to solve development problems in particular contexts.
The service paradigm suggests a goal-oriented modeling of method fragments,
thus methods as services emphasize the intention of a developer and consequently
they reduce the semantic distance between available methods in a methods base
and developer's requests. Against components, services emphasize usage concerns
rather engineering aspects. So, a method (or a fragment of method) viewed as a
service is selected for the problem it solves rather than the solution it delivers.
Furthermore, goal orientation is very suitable to variability specification. In method
engineering, variability is related to method flexibility. A service is able to deliver
several methods fragments to achieve one goal, each one being relevant in a spe-
cific project context. By supporting variability, services allow to achieve method
adaptation to particular project situation.
Web-based context leads to relate service description to ontologies. By using
the service paradigm in method engineering, we have to address the construction
of an ontology for the IS engineering methods domain. Such an ontology is useful
for annotating method fragments with semantic on actors, processes and products
involved in methods. An ontology of method seems promising for methodological
knowledge sharing and management.
Lastly, service orientation leads to a new approach in method constructing: start-
ing from a developer's intention, the problem is to discover, select and compose
services to satisfy the intention. The web-based context supports at any time, adding
and deleting services. Because the composition of services is realized at execu-
tion time, the satisfaction of an intention can benefit all the services available at
this time and the selection of the more suitable services can take into account the
current context of the intention. The dynamic composition principle issued from
service-oriented computing seems to be very powerful to achieve in an automatic
way method construction from a methods base.
3 SO2M: An Overview
This section introduces the main elements of SO2M (Service Oriented Meta-
Method) (see Fig. 1) . SO2M is used to build development methods. Ideally, given a
developer's request and a set of method services , the composition process would find