Output details

Process-centered review of object oriented software development methodologies

<09>The widespread application of object-oriented (OO) development methodologies has had significant impact on software engineering research and practice, particularly on modelling languages and development processes. Previous techniques for scheduling development practices and coordinating developers were largely difficult to reuse, or were inapplicable. This led to 25 years of intense research on the development, assessment and application of new methodologies to support object-oriented styles of software engineering. Much of this research has dwelled on the notations/language used; the processes that developers apply have either largely been ignored, or has been considered in research that is unstructured, lacking in common terminology, or devoid of conceptual frameworks to support comparison and selection. This survey paper synthesizes 25 years of research on 28 object-oriented development methodologies, and presents a unique coarse-grained (in terms of process) and fine-grained (in terms of development activities) classification, critique and analysis of OO methodologies. Uniquely, it uses templates (abstract and structured descriptions) to describe methodologies orthogonally to the languages they use, facilitating comparison and selection of methodologies. The importance of this survey is both theoretical (to support teaching of OO) and practical (in terms of selecting methodologies to deploy). The survey has attracted considerable attention in the community. It sets out remaining significant challenges and the road ahead for the SE community, in particular the need for an extensible core methodology, with traceability supported as a first-class methodological concept. Subsequent research and the SEMAT initiative (http://semat.org) has substantiated this observation. Although aimed at the research community, for new PhD students the survey has proved successful in providing a thorough introduction and overview of the field, and the paper is used as a teaching reference throughout the world.