FDMD: Feature-Driven Methodology Development

Situational Method Engineering (SME) is a branch of software engineering which helps develop bespoke methodologies to fit the specific characteristics of the software project at hand. As in software development, SME too involves rigorous Requirements Engineering (RE), so much so that if requirements elicitation and definition is mishandled in any way, methodology development will most likely fail as a result. In this paper, we propose a Feature-driven methodology for SME; in this SME methodology, the requirements of the target methodology are 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. Due to the object-oriented nature of Features and the rest of its deliverables, our proposed Feature-Driven Methodology Development (FDMD) process is fully seamless; this also facilitates the development of tool support for the methodology which is produced by applying FDMD.