Situational methods are approaches to the development of software systems that are designed and constructed to fit particular circumstances that often refer to project characteristics. One common way to create situational methods is to reuse method components, which are the building blocks of development methods. For this purpose, method components must be stored in a method base, and then retrieved and composed specifically for the situation in hand. Most approaches in the field of situational method engineering require the expertise of method engineers to support the retrieval and composition of method components. Furthermore, this is usually done in an ad-hoc manner and for pre-defined situations. In this paper, the authors propose an approach, supported by a tool that creates situational methods semi-automatically. This approach refers to structural and behavioral considerations and a wide variety of characteristics when comparing method components and composing them into situational methods. The resultant situational methods are stored in the method base for future usage and composition. Based on an experimental study of the approach, the authors show that it provides correct and suitable draft situational methods, which human evaluators have assessed as relevant for the given situations.

Design patterns provide reusable solutions for recurring design problems. They constitute an important tool for improving software quality. However, correct usage of design patterns depends to a large extent on the designer. Design patterns often include models that describe the suggested solutions, while other aspects of the patterns are neglected or described informally only in text. Furthermore, design pattern solutions are usually described in an object-oriented fashion that is too close to the implementation, masking the essence of and motivation behind a particular design pattern. We suggest an approach to modeling the different aspects of design patterns and semi-automatically utilizing these models to improve software design. Evaluating our approach on commonly used design patterns and a case study of an automatic application for composing, taking, checking, and grading analysis and design exams, we found that the suggested approach successfully locates the main design problems modeled by the selected design patterns.

UML has been largely adopted as a standard modeling language. The emergence of UML from different modeling languages that refer to various system aspects causes a wide variety of completeness and correctness problems in UML models. Several methods have been proposed for dealing with correctness issues, mainly providing internal consistency rules but ignoring correctness and completeness with respect to the system requirements and the domain constraints. In this article, we propose addressing both completeness and correctness problems of UML models by adopting a domain analysis approach called application-based domain modeling (ADOM). We present experimental results from our study which checks the quality of application models when utilizing ADOM on UML. The results advocate that the availability of the domain model helps achieve more complete models without reducing the comprehension of these models.