Online Method Engine: A Toolset for Method Assessment, Improvement and Enactment

Software companies keep evolving their methods for software production, due to the continuous changes in the organizational, technological, and societal context. Implementing changes to existing methods is a complex activity, which depends not only on understanding 'what' to alter, but also on defining 'how' to apply the changes. Approaches in the literature are mainly focused on the 'what', provide only partial answers to the 'how' question, and offer no concrete toolset to support change. In this paper, we propose and discuss a software toolset that realizes the online method engine (OME) concept and provides a concrete answer to the 'how' question by supporting the iterative and incremental assessment, improvement, and enactment of methods for software production. The authors describe the technical architecture of our toolset that concretely realizes our previously proposed OME concept, provide details on the method enactment mechanism, and report on a qualitative evaluation based on interviews with experienced industrial practitioners in process improvement.