The need for higher productivity of system engineering teams, as well as better quality of the artifacts produced, motivates the development of methods to adapt/compose/extend methodologies so that they fit the project situation at hand. This is known as Situational Methodology Engineering (SME). There are several methodology engineering approaches, namely Assembly-based, Extension-based, Paradigm-based and Hybrid, which provide techniques for constructing project-specific methodologies instead of looking for universally-applicable ones.

A process pattern describes a collection of general techniques, actions, and/or tasks for developing software systems. In my thesis, the goal is to extract Methodology Engineering process patterns in order to define a generic process model for Methodology Engineering.