Practice-driven approach for creating project-specific software development methods

Both practitioners and researchers agree that if software development methods were more adjustable to project-specific situations, this would increase their use in practice. Empirical investigations show that otherwise methods exist just on paper while in practice developers avoid them or do not follow them rigorously. In this paper we present an approach that deals with this problem. Process Configuration, as we named the approach, tells how to create a project-specific method from an existing one, taking into account the project circumstances. Compared to other approaches that deal with the creation of project-specific methods, our approach tends to be more flexible and easier to implement in practice as it introduces few simplifications. The proposed approach is practice-driven, i.e. it has been developed in cooperation with software development companies.