Metamodeling editor as a front end tool for a CASE shell

Customizable Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, often called CASE shells, are penetrating in the market. CASE shells provide a flexible environment to support a variety of information systems development methods. CASE shells are often cumbersome to use and in practice few people can model and implement methods in them. To overcome these problems we have developed a graphical metamodeling environment called MetaEdit and a method modeling interface to the CASE shell RAMATIC. Using this interface the methodology engineer can develop graphical models in RAMATIC's model definition language and then easily generate the resource files that control the operations of RAMATIC. MetaEdit…

How to combine tools and methods in practice— a field study

In spring 1989 we surveyed the experiences of some Finnish companies in methodology modelling (metamodelling) and adaptation of tools and methodologies to each other (methodology adaptation). The companies represented software production, banking, wood and metal industry, and wholesale trade. The study was carried out as a field study where we interviewed method developers, systems analysts and their supervisors. The goal of the survey was to find out whether there was need for metamodelling or methodology adaptation in general and how this need had been satisfied. The study shows that a little experience had been gained in adapting data dictionaries to methodologies but no such attempts ha…

Explaining Change Paths of Systems and Software Development Practices

This chapter discusses how systems development practices are shaped. Based on interviews conducted in ten development organizations and previous literature, we identify eight types of change paths in systems development practices: emergence, adoption, idealization, formalization, abandonment, informalization, entropy, and disobedience. We argue that the eight change path types provide an integrated theoretical framework on the study of how systems development practices change in organizations, projects, and among individual developers in a given context. We discuss how this framework complements existing theories and concepts of the contemporary literature on systems development.

Modeling Requirements for Future CASE

In this paper we discuss some requirements for future CASE Computer Aided Software/Systems Engineering environments. These requirements include increased modifiability and flexibility as well as support for process and agent models. We claim that they can only be addressed by developing more powerful representation and modeling techniques. As a possible basis for modeling various techniques, we outline a general information architecture for a future CASE environment. In addition, we propose primitive types for specifying techniques, the development process, and agent models, and use these types for modeling an example methodology and examine how the requirements are or can be supported in o…

An annotated CASE bibliography

MetaEdit— A flexible graphical environment for methodology modelling

Existing CASE tools are often rigid and do not support the users' native methodologies. To alleviate this, more flexible and customisable tools called CASE shells are emerging. However, the customisation of those tools is still cumbersome and error-prone, and demands several configuration files that follow a rigid syntax of some metamodelling language(s). In order to make the customisation easier, we propose a graphical metamodelling editor, MetaEdit, with which the conceptual structures of the user methodology can be modelled easily using an easy-to-grasp graphical notation. With MetaEdit, methodology models can be constructed with less effort and the configuration files for the CASE shell…

Towards a Framework for Building Theory from ISD Practices

The paper presents a framework for building theory from ISD practices. The framework locates ISD practices in a learning loop that is situated in a development context. The framework recognizes that ISD practices are related to their learned rationale that may come from previous experiences, i.e. observed impacts of practices, or from existing theory. These concepts recognized by the framework are needed for building theory from ISD practices, for designing research approaches for studying ISD, for evaluating existing research on ISD practices and for evaluating ISD methods. The framework is also used in the analysis of three recent studies on ISD practices and a discussion about the uses o…