Finding Optimal Plans for Incremental Method Engineering

Abstract. Incremental method engineering proposes to evolve the information systems development methods of a software company through a step-wise improvement process. In practice, this approach proved to be effective for re-ducing the risks of failure while introducing method changes. However, little at-tention has been paid to the important problem of identifying an adequate plan for implementing the changes in the company’s context. To overcome this de-ficiency, we propose an approach that assists analysts by suggesting—via au-tomated reasoning—optimal and quasi-optimal plans for implementing method changes. After formalizing the Process-Deliverable Diagrams language for de-scribing the method changes to implement, we present a planning framework for generating plans that comply with different types of constraints. We also describe an implementation of the modeling and planning components of our approach