Abstract:

Since their introduction at around the turn of the millennium, agile methods have taken the software process research and practice by storm. However, despite their wide and ever-expanding acceptance, many of those methods have limitations in terms of the types of projects they could support. In parallel, there is mounting evidence that creating a method that is optimum for every software project is unattainable and impractical. In this paper, we propose not the selection or the adoption of a single agile method but the adoption and diffusion of a well established and recognized method framework in which an organizational methodology is constructed from method fragments using the concepts of method engineering. This paper briefly reports on a case study of introducing method engineering using the OPEN process framework to construct an agile method for a multi-national legal publishing company who realized the need for a flexible and customizable method for their many projects.