Developing Families of Method-Oriented Architecture

The method engineering paradigm is motivated by the need for software development methods suitable for specific situations and requirements of organizations in general and projects in particular. Assembly-based method engineering, as one of the prominent approaches in method engineering, creates project-specific methods by (re-)using method components, specified with method processes and products, and stored in method repositories. This paper tries to address the two challenges of assembly-based method engineering related to more effective: i) publication and sharing of method components; and ii) management of variability in software methods, which have many commonalties. In order to address these two challenges, we propose the concept of Families of Method-Oriented Architectures. This concept is built on top of the principles of service-oriented architectures and software product lines.