Process Centred Approach for Developing Tool Support of Situated Methods

A reuse based approach to construct software tool supporting a specific method built « on the fly » is presented in this paper. Its originality is to apply a process view on the reusable component which is either method chunk or software chunk. Our process view leads to construct method and software tool by assembling chunks. Chunks which are either method or software ones can be assembled in different ways depending on the situation of the project at hand. One of these ways is called a method or a software path. Our aim is to support the construction of a specific method path and its use in a CASE environment. The paper focuses on (i) the description of a process centred approach for software tool development (ii) its use in the development of the tool « l’écritoire » and (iii) the support of software engineer through a set of guidelines.