Software engineers have long realized that they cannot use existing methodologies for all project situations, as every software development project has its own specific characteristics. Therefore, a branch of software engineering–known as Situational Method Engineering (SME)–has emerged which helps develop bespoke methodologies to fit the specific characteristics of each and every project situation. As in software development, SME too involves rigorous Requirements Engineering (RE), so much so that if requirements elicitation and definition is botched in any way, methodology development will most likely fail as a result. In software engineering, requirements engineering has long been the focus of research and practice, resulting in a myriad of practical methods and patterns. In contrast, the RE methods that are currently practiced in SME are still in their infancy, and the majority of the requirements extracted in SME endeavours are non-functional in nature; elicitation of functional requirements is still being neglected, and quality suffers as a consequence.
The main objective of this project is to propose a Feature-Driven methodology for Situational Method Engineering; in this SME methodology, the functional requirements of the product will be captured as Features. First introduced in the agile FDD (Feature-Driven Development) methodology, Features are fully object-oriented and provide all the benefits that the object-oriented paradigm has to offer. As the first step towards developing the target SME methodology, the research previously conducted on RE in SME will be reviewed. An object-oriented paradigm (in the form of a metamodel) will then be defined for methodology description; based on this metamodel, a method will be developed for describing functional requirements of methodologies in terms of object-oriented features. This will set the final stage for producing the target feature-driven methodology for situational methodology engineering; the validity of the target methodology will be assessed based on methodology evaluation criteria, and also through a case study.