While previously available methodologies for software – like those published in the early days of object technology – claimed to be appropriate for every conceivable project, situational method engineering (SME) acknowledges that most projects typically have individual characteristics and situations. Thus, finding the most effective methodology for a particular project needs specific tailoring to that situation. Such a tailored software development methodology needs to take into account all the bits and pieces needed for an organization to develop software, including the software process, the input and output work products, the people involved, the languages used to describe requirements, design, code, and eventually also measures of success or failure. The authors have structured the book into three parts. Part I deals with all the basic concepts, terminology and overall ideas underpinning situational method engineering. As a summary of this part, they present a formal meta-model that enables readers to create their own quality methods and supporting tools. In Part II, they explain how to implement SME in practice, i.e., how to find method components and put them together and how to evaluate the resulting method. For illustration, they also include several industry case studies of customized or constructed processes, highlighting the impact that high-quality engineered methods can have on the success of an industrial software development. Finally, Part III summarizes some of the more recent and forward-looking ideas. This book presents the first summary of the state of the art for SME. For academics, it provides a comprehensive conceptual framework and discusses new research areas. For lecturers, thanks to its step-by-step explanations from basics to the customization and quality assessment of constructed methods, it serves as a solid basis for comprehensive courses on the topic. For industry methodologists, it offers a reference guide on features and technologies to consider when developing in-house software development methods or customising and adopting off-the-shelf ones.

Over the last decade, Method Engineering, defined as the engineering discipline to design, construct and adapt methods, including supportive tools, has emerged as the research and application area for using methods for systems development. This book contains the papers from the IFIP Working Group 8.1 conference on Situational Method Engineering.

Method Engineering focuses on the design, construction and evaluation of methods, techniques and support tools for information systems development It addresses a number of important topics, including: method representation formalisms; meta-modelling; situational methods; contingency approaches; system development practices of method engineering; terminology and reference models; ontologies; usability and experience reports; and organisational support and impact.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 8th International Symposium on Business Modeling and Software Design, BMSD 2018, held in Vienna, Austria, in July 2018. The 14 full papers and 21 short papers selected for inclusion in this book deal with a large number of research topics: (i) Some topics concern Business Processes (BP), such as BP modeling / notations / visualizations, BP management, BP variability, BP contracting, BP interoperability, BP modeling within augmented reality, inter-enterprise collaborations, and so on; (ii) Other topics concern Software Design, such as software ecosystems, specification of context-aware software systems, service-oriented solutions and micro-service architectures, product variability, software development monitoring, and so on; (iii) Still other topics are crosscutting with regard to business modeling and software design, such as data analytics as well as information security and privacy; (iv) Other topics concern hot technology / innovation areas, such as blockchain technology and internet-of-things. Underlying with regard to all those topics is the BMSD’18 theme: Enterprise Engineering and Software Engineering - Processes and Systems for the Future.

Providing an introduction to situational analysis, Adele E. Clarke outlines how this method differs from and is superior to grounded theory and to qualitative data analysis.

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, and medicine, but little information exists in an integral format to support this goal. Designing for Situation Awareness helps designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in complex settings and recognize the factors that undermine this process. Designing to support operator SA reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to occur largely due to failures in SA. Whereas many previous human factors efforts have focused on design at the perceptual and surface feature level, SA-oriented design focuses on the operator's information needs and cognitive processes as they juggle to integrate information from many sources and achieve multiple competing goals. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective. By applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process, human factors practitioners can create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues. This book serves as a helpful reference to that end.

"This book provides a compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations of concepts in various areas of systems and design, as well as a vast collection of cutting-edge research articles from the field's leading experts"--Provided by publisher.