A great deal of effort is needed to construct software products in a predictable and repeatable manner. Having a precisely defined methodology in place can certainly help, especially if it includes the comprehensive specification of the process to be followed and the work products to be created. However, a convenient integration of these two aspects (process and work product) has not yet been performed. This paper presents a new approach to the definition of methodologies that supports the process and work product domains concurrently through the specification of discrete methodology elements. Some of these elements, called here templates, are designed to be instantiated during the use of the methodology in specific projects, while others, called resources, are intended to be used directly. Theoretical and practical implications of this division, especially regarding metamodelling and the use of powertypes, are explored. The proposed metamodelling approach is shown to facilitate the precise and complete specification of comprehensive methodologies, establishing the foundations for predictable and repeatable results from software development. 1

several research efforts are underway to develop appropriate meta-models for agent-oriented methodologies. Meta-models are meant to check and verify the completeness and expressiveness of methodologies. In this paper, we put to test the well-established standard Unified Modelling Language (UML), and the emergent Object Process Methodology (OPM), and compare their meta-modelling power. Both UML and OPM are used to express the meta-model of SODA, an agent-oriented methodology which stresses interaction and social aspects of MASs (multi-agent systems). Meta-modelling SODA allows us to evaluate the effectiveness of the two approaches over both the structural and dynamics parts. Furthermore, this allow us to find out some desirable features that any effective approach to meta-modelling MAS methodologies should exhibit. 1 Meta-models for MAS The definition of a methodology is an interactive process, in which a core is defined and then extended to include all the needed concepts. Meta-modelling

Abstract. Some overall method characteristics, such as agility and scalability, have become increasingly important. These characteristics are different from existing method requirements which focus on the functional purposes of individual method chunks and overall methods. Characteristics like agility and scalability are often not embodied in the function of a single method chunk but are instead reflected in constraints over one or more method chunks, connections between method chunks and cross-cutting aspects of the overall method. We propose the concept of method tactics, which are techniques for achieving certain method quality attributes. We identify a list of method tactics focusing on agility and scalability by considering factors that affect these quality attributes. We validate the feasibility of using method tactics by applying them to traditional software development method chunks and deriving practices for agile development. We examine the effectiveness of the tactics by comparing our derived practices with existing practices for agile development. The comparison results show that most of the derived practices are found in existing agile methods. We also identify new practices that may have potential for use in agile methods. The results demonstrate initial support for our proposal for the use of method tactics, and for the extraction or invention of further cross-cutting primitive method tactics for more flexible situational method engineering. 1

Abstract. There are many different process meta-models that offer different viewpoints of a same process: activity oriented, product oriented, decision oriented, context oriented and strategy oriented. However, the complementarity between their concepts is not explicit and there is no consensus about the concepts themselves. This problem leads to inadequate process meta-models with organization needs, so the instantiated models do not correspond to the specific demands and constraints of the organizations or projects. However,, method engineers should be able to build process metamodels according to the specific organization needs. We propose a method to build unified, fitted and multi-viewpoints process meta-models. The process engineering method is based on a process domain model and on patterns.

Abstract. One of the most stimulating research lines in software engineering today, process engineering is currently a hot topic in agentoriented software engineering research [1–4]. A number of methodologies have been designed such as ADELFE, ASPECS, INGENIAS, MaSE, PASSI, Prometheus, SODA, Tropos,..., each of which with their own specificities. Sometimes, when a multi-agent application has to be designed, the methodology chosen does not completely fit for the whole development process. The current proposed approach is to take benefits to all existing methodologies and to reuse during the development process those parts that are the most relevant in order to build a new process engineering. There, process engineering aims at building libraries of suitable methods from/for agent oriented methodologies, thus helping in cataloguing current processes, assessing their utility, and rebuilding them according to developer needs. In this paper, we first provide a general