Method Association Approach: Situational construction and evaluation of an implementation method for software products

International audience; — Software implementation is one of the important steps in a software engineering process. It consists of integrating software based services or components in business alignment with the organizational view and acceptance from the users' perspectives. However, this step is complex and not supported in detail by the existing design and implementation methods. When implementing a software product in a customer organization with a specific context, the problem of the choice of the method or its adaptation is crucial to ensure the implementation success. Software producing organizations have difficulty with the creation of the most suitable implementation method for their software products. Situational Method Engineering (SME) proposes solutions to create methods adapted to the project at hand. We propose an approach to build an implementation method based on the association of method fragments, offering two advantages: it facilitates (a) the modeling of fragments by using the Process Deliverable Diagram formalism (PDD) that has proved its efficacy and simplicity, and (b) the selection of fragments by using metrics to analyze them. We illustrate our proposal with a case study to create an implementation method for a personal health management software product. Keywords— Software product implementation method, situational method engineering, method association, feature, method fragment, project situation