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Earlier software development processes (SDPs), such as waterfall processes, were mainly focused on process steps and did not address people- and product-related issues. Emergence of Software development methodologies (SDM) has created a new paradigm for developing software systems. A SDM is a special kind of technically engineered framework for organizing SDPs; this framework is expected to specify three main interwoven elements, namely people, products, and process. It has since become evident that it is impossible to provide a general-purpose SDM for developing all the various kinds of software systems, and it has thus become essential to construct the most appropriate methodology for the system development situation in hand, a practice commonly called Situational Method Engineering (SME). The problem with existing SME methods is lack of adequate attention to the role of people who might seek or possess valuable knowledge about the project situation. This knowledge can be tacit information that is hidden in the developer's mind, or it might be explicitly available. This paper proposes a knowledge management (KM)-driven and DevOps-based SME method as a new integrated multi-view methodological paradigm that satisfies the need for sharing human experience in engineering SDMs. The method has been proposed by reusing general SME practices and complementing them by embedding appropriate KM and DevOps practices to alleviate the weaknesses of previous SME methods. Furthermore, the proposed method has been evaluated through four case studies and also by conducting a criteria-based comparison with eight prominent SME methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital business ecosystem (DBE) is a paradigm that enables developing and monitoring novel business models of collaborating organisations and individuals using ICT as the foundation. Different from traditional online networked models such as manufacturer, retailer, or franchise centred, using a shared digital environment, DBE fosters heterogeneity, symbiosis, coevolution, and self-organisation of its multiple actors, which enables it to span different business domains as well as exhibits diverse interests. For many organisations and individuals, DBE presents a new collaborative approach to leverage offered and desired resources among the involved members to meet each of their goals. As such, it is foreseen to be of high value to the involved actors, but at the same time, it is often complex due to many correlated interactions of these actors and thus difficult to design and manage. Furthermore, the current state of the art shows a lack of methodological guidance for DBE design. We propose a method for DBE design that follows the requirements collected from industry experts and practitioners by applying situational method engineering to enable its modularised design. The method for design is validated by action research in the setting of Digital Vaccine, a Swedish DBE managing health-related services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of new business models is essential for startups to become successful, as well as for established companies to explore new business opportunities. However, developing such business models is a continuous challenging activity where different tasks need to be performed, and business decisions need to be made. Both have to fit the constantly changeable situation in which the business model is developed to reduce the risk of developing ineffective business models with low market penetration. Therefore, a method for developing situation-specific business models is needed. As a solution, we refine the concept of situational method engineering (SME) to business model development. SME, in turn, provides means to construct situation-specific development methods out of fragments from a method repository. We develop a concept for the continuous situation-specific development of business models based on design science. The approach uses the roles of a domain expert, a method engineer, and a business developer together with a repository with method fragments for developing business models and a repository with modeling artifacts for supporting the development. Both repositories are filled by utilizing the experience of domain experts. Out of these repositories, situation-specific development methods for developing business models can be continuously composed based on the changeable situation by the method engineer and enacted by the business developer. We implement it as an open-source tool and evaluate its applicability in an industrial case study of developing a business model for a local event platform. Our results show that situation awareness supports the continuous development of business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks have justified their efficiency to improve the enterprise functioning by providing a whole vision of an organization aligned to its strategy. However, these frameworks are often heavy and are not used integrally as they are not completely suitable for the situation at hand. To tackle this problem, we suggest using a component-based vision of EA frameworks. Our goal is to identify a set of EA components that could be used independently from each other and to use them depending on the context. This approach could be used to implement the whole EA method in an organization, to provide a progressive integration of different components, or to improve an existing EA by adding the lacking components. We called our proposal the SEA (Situational Enterprise Architecture) approach. In this paper, we propose a model to formalize EA components and illustrate this model with the TOGAF framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explorative business process management (BPM) is attracting increasing interest in the literature and professional practice. Organizations have recognized that a focus on operational efficiency is no longer sufficient when disruptive forces can make the value proposition of entire processes obsolete. So far, however, research on how to create entirely new processes has remained largely conceptual, leaving it open how explorative BPM can be put into practice. Following the design science research paradigm and situational method engineering, we address this research gap by proposing a method called the Five Diamond Method. This method guides explorative BPM activities by supporting organizations in identifying opportunities from business and technology trends and integrating them into business processes with novel value propositions. The method is evaluated against literature-backed design objectives and competing artifacts, qualitative data gathered from BPM practitioners, as well as a pilot study and two real-world applications. This research provides two contributions. First, the Five Diamond Method broadens the scope of BPM by integrating prescriptive knowledge from innovation management. Second, the method supports capturing emerging opportunities arising from changing customer needs and digital technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities, that is, action possibilities for innovative business models, goods, services and processes, particularly affect idea generation, which is vital for innovation success. Capitalizing on opportunities requires complementing predominating problem‐centred innovation approaches. Despite mature knowledge on idea generation, there is still a limited understanding on how to leverage opportunities. Hence, there is a limited set of methods available that provide formalized guidance. To address this gap, we co‐developed an opportunity‐led ideation method in an action design research project with one of Australia's leading financial service providers. Thanks to this immersive collaboration, our method reflects not only the intent of researchers and existing knowledge but also the influence and needs of practitioners. Building on established opportunity sources from the literature, this method structures the idea generation stage of the innovation process into the activities initiation, immersion, investigation and integration. The method provides guidance on how to transform opportunities into ideas and presents activities, techniques, tools and roles that are important within the idea generation stage. Our research theoretically extends the understanding of opportunity identification within the front end of innovation. Moreover, it provides insights on balancing formalization and creativity within idea generation. Organizations can use the method as a blueprint to systematically and proactive sense, assess and translate opportunities into ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrum is currently the most widely used agile methodology. However, it is regarded as a framework rather than a concrete process. Unfortunately, the resources available on Scrum do not explicitly define its variable parts and do not offer proper guidance on how to resolve those variabilities. Process (re)configuration is thus left to Scrum Retrospective sessions; this can delay the vital decisions that can significantly improve the process before problems arise. This paper aims to address the problems associated with configuring/reconfiguring Scrum by identifying all the variabilities (variation points) in the Scrum framework, along with the situations where a variation point can be resolved by one or more specific variants. We propose a Software Process Line (SPrL) approach for achieving this: we have represented the process variabilities of Scrum as a Scrum metaprocess, which acts as the core process of a generic SPrL for Scrum. The situations in which each variation point of the metaprocess can be resolved by a specific variant have been identified. The metaprocess has been implemented in the Medini-QVT tool, along with transformation rules that provide the means for automatic resolution of the variabilities. The validity of the metaprocess has been evaluated through an industrial case study, the results of which show that the metaprocess is applicable in real situations. Furthermore, the results indicate that the processes instantiated from the metaprocess can improve the existing processes by proposing specific practices for addressing their shortcomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lack of shared understanding among stakeholders is a commonly cited drawback in enterprise architecture development. Stakeholders need to have shared understanding of requirements and principles for an enterprise architecture, and the extent to which the resultant architecture addresses their concerns. However, existing approaches for enterprise architecture development lack adequate capabilities for managing aspects associated with creating shared understanding among stakeholders. Although such aspects can be largely managed by approaches for collaborative decision making and soft systems thinking, these approaches lack details on the enterprise architecture process and its products. Therefore, this paper explores ways of mutually diminishing these gaps through adopting situational method engineering, to guide the development of a situational method for enabling stakeholders to acquire shared understanding of requirements for an enterprise architecture. The situational method presented herein is a component of a broader method for supporting collaboration between stakeholders and architects during enterprise architecture creation. Although the latter was successfully evaluated in 6 enterprises, it exhibited highest performance scores in two enterprises after it was amended with the situational method. Therefore, this paper also presents key findings from evaluating the situational method in the two agencies that are located in Uganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. Despite mature knowledge, many approaches have been criticized to lack guidance on how to put process improvement into practice. Given the variety of emerging digital technologies, organizations not only face a process improvement black box, but also high uncertainty regarding digital technologies. This paper thus proposes a method that supports organizations in exploiting the digitalization potential of their business processes. To achieve this, action design research and situational method engineering were adopted. Two design cycles involving practitioners (i.e., managers and BPM experts) and end-users (i.e., process owners and participants) were conducted. In the first cycle, the method’s alpha version was evaluated by interviewing practitioners from five organizations. In the second cycle, the beta version was evaluated via real-world case studies. In this paper, detailed results of one case study, which was conducted at a semiconductor manufacturer, are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In small-scale software development organizations, software engineers are beginning to realize the significance of adapting software development methods according to project conditions. There is a requirement to proliferate this know-how to other developers, who may be facing the same settings/context, so that they too can benefit from others’ experiences. In this paper, the application of situational method engineering in requirements elicitation phase is investigated. A novel, simple and dynamic web-based tool, Situational Requirement Method System (SRMS), is developed which can aid in conception/formulation, repository, and elicitation/derivation of methods related with this stage. The proposed approach and tool are validated by distributing a questionnaire among software professionals working in large software companies, and making SRMS accessible to them. The results indicate that a majority of the participants finds SRMS useful and provides various suggestions to improve it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Engineering is considered a knowledge-intensive discipline, in which knowledge creation, collection and sharing is an uninterrupted process. However, a large part of this knowledge exists in a tacit form and depends on practitioners. Therefore defining a mechanism to transform tacit knowledge into explicit one is of upmost importance. This paper presents a formalization approach to represent Software Engineering practitioners' tacit knowledge, which is related to their ways of working, as a set of explicit statements. The formalization is based on KUALIBEH, which is a normative kernel extension of ESSENCE formal specification, and consists of three parts: an ontology to share a common representation of knowledge as a set of concepts; a Situational Method Engineering based algebra that represents well-defined method properties and operations; and a knowledge representation of the ontology and algebra using Description Logics. The main objectives of this initial formalization are to improve communication among humans and machines, computational inference and reuse of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many organizations migrate on-premise software applications to the cloud. However, current coarse-grained cloud migration solutions have made such migrations a non transparent task, an endeavor based on trial-and-error. This paper presents Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration ( V- P A M), a migration method based on (i) a catalogue of fine-grained service-based cloud architecture migration patterns that target multi-cloud, (ii) a situational migration process framework to guide pattern selection and composition, and (iii) a variability model to structure system migration into a coherent framework. The proposed migration patterns are based on empirical evidence from several migration projects, best practice for cloud architectures and a systematic literature review of existing research. Variability-based, Pattern-driven Architecture Migration allows an organization to (i) select appropriate migration patterns, (ii) compose them to define a migration plan, and (iii) extend them based on the identification of new patterns in new contexts. The patterns are at the core of our solution, embedded into a process model, with their selection governed by a variability model. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]