Methodology engineering is a branch of software engineering which deals with the design, development, and modification of methodologies, and the techniques and tools for developing information systems. Methodology engineering requirements demand the support of Computer Aided Methodology Engineering (CAME) tools. Recently, method engineering focus has shifted towards Situational Method Engineering (SME); i.e. context-specific methodology development. The emergence of SME approaches has brought about various methods for methodology development; including ad hoc, paradigm-based, extension-based and assembly-based approaches. In the assembly-based strategy, appropriate method chunks are extracted from the repository of a CAME and assembled into a tailored-to-fit methodology. One of the most commonly-used CAME tools is EFPC, which provides a substrate for the definition, storage, retrieval and assembly method chunks. Despite its capabilities, EPFC suffers from the lack of a rich repository of method chunks to develop a wide-range of current methodologies. Fortunately, the core repository of EPFC provides extensibility.
The main goal of this project is the development of an EPFC-based Methodology Engineering environment, specially targeted at the development of agile methodologies. As the first step, we identify necessary method chunks, including umbrella activities, and propose a repository of agile method chunks for enhancing EPFC’s support for agile methodologies. As the next step, we map the identified method chunks to methodology requirements; this offers a good categorization for the usage of proposed method chunks. Our main concerns are the comprehensive study of SME requirements, agile methodologies and their corresponding method chunks, and the mapping of requirements to method chunks. This research concludes with the enhancement of EPFC with a suitable environment and guidelines for developing agile methodologies. The proposed environment will be evaluated and validated through conducting a concrete SME project.