An ontologically-based evaluation of software design methods

We express our gratitude to Pierre America, Len Bass, Alistair Cockburn, Christine Hofmeister and Philippe Kruchten for critically reviewing an earlier draft of the paper. Their comments and suggestions have significantly improved the quality of this work.

NICTA is a national research institute with a charter to build Australia’s pre-eminent Centre of Excellence for Information and Communications Technology (ICT). NICTA is building capabilities in ICT research, research training and commercialisation in the ICT sector for the greater benefit of the nation. NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and the Australian Research Council through the ICT Centre of Excellence program.

To distinguish between process artefacts and object artefacts, we introduce the index ‘p’ for ‘process artefact’.

We have limited our analysis of RUP to the introductory description provided by Kruchten (2004). Analysing RUP as the commercial product sold by IBM is beyond the scope of this paper.

We have created the term ‘Agile Alliance Approach’ to subsume the various, often overlapping techniques known in the area of agile software development.