Reuse Mechanisms in Situational Method Engineering

Methods describe systematic procedures to overcome problems. It has been widely acknowledged that methods have to be adapted to the context of their application in order to maximize their impact. Since the original proposal of situational method engineering, numerous approaches have been introduced to tackle this problem. In order to efficiently design situation specific methods it is necessary to reuse existing knowledge. Reuse mechanisms have emerged in different research areas that can be transferred to method engineering. The objective of this paper is to identify relevant reuse mechanisms for method engineering and to review the literature for their usage. Thereof, we derive suggestions for the improvement of existing method engineering approaches and the design of new ones.