Background

Interest in Computer Aided/Assisted Software/Systems Engineering (CASE) has been growing due to advances in computing power, object-orientation, client-server architectures and graphical interfaces. Another reason is that system development is still plagued by mediocre productivity and insufficient quality which could be addressed by better process and coordination technologies. These issues raise several research questions.

The first concerns the need to describe, analyze and manage multiple types of descriptions in the CASE environment in a way that allows for their consistent, efficient and user-friendly manipulation. This raises the issue: what are the requirements for representation schemes to adequately describe and model the data stored, represented and manipulated in the IS repository.

The second concerns the need for a disciplined process of using and applying these representation schemes. This issue we call the method engineering problem: how to specify, manage, develop and maintain such a repository? Both these issues have been largely ignored until recent years. Both commercial CASE tool builders and methodology vendors suggest ad hoc solutions to this problem.

The third issue concerns the need to develop computer tools for method engineering. We call this area computer aided method engineering (CAME).

The fourth issue deals with the future of system development methods. While current CASE tools support methods that were developed in the 1970's (structured methods), or in the 1980's (object-oriented methods) for manually based methods, their support functionality does not take into account the versatile functionality a computer supported environment can offer, for example hypertext features. Therefore the method modeling issue must also be explored from the viewpoint of how to develop "computer engineered" methods instead of remaining caught in a "paper-and-pencil" mindset.

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Pages created by Steven Kelly. Last update July 5, 1999 by Jouni Huotari.