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Practitioners and researchers working on Software Development Methodologies (SDM) have always sought for ways to raise the degree of flexibility in SDMs, so that methodologies can be adjusted to specific project situations. Methodology Engineering (ME) approaches are being pursued to this aim, giving rise to Situational Method Engineering (SME). As the pivotal phase of software development, Requirements Engineering (RE) has proved essential in SME; however, SME has a long way to go as to its support for specialized RE practices. The RE practices employed in software engineering seem to provide a rich resource for strategies and techniques that can address this issue, if properly attuned to... 

The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is concerned with applying the concept of system architecture to enterprises, esp. to their information technology, so as to create a common perspective, facilitate understanding and improvement of the enterprise, and help better organizational change management. EA methodologies are used for modeling, planning, implementation and management of EA. A plethora of such methodologies have been introduced in recent decades, that widely differ in terms of structure, content and terminology, which has hindered their evaluation, comparison and selection. Furthermore, a consensus has emerged that EA methodologies should be contingent on the specifics of... 

Agents are autonomous entities that have independent threads of control, and that interact with each other in their environment. Due to the intelligence of agents and their ability as to social interaction, an agent-oriented system exhibits remarkable synergistic traits. Agent-oriented software development facilitates the development of flexible systems that exhibit complex behaviors.Traditional software development methodologies do not sufficiently satisfy the special needs of the agent-oriented paradigm. Therefore, many researchers have focused on developing specialized agent-oriented methodologies, or have worked on extending or adapting existing methodologies so that they can be used for... 

The Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) approach provides a systematic way to identify, modularize, and represent aspects, i.e. crosscutting concerns in software systems. AOSD methods bring a high level of changeability, configurability, and maintainability in the presence of ever-changing users' requirements. Focusing on aspects during early stages of the software development lifecycle has consequently received special attention by many researchers, leading to the advent of numerous AOSD methods. This has accordingly given a relatively high level of maturity to aspect-oriented (AO) processes. Process patterns, on the other hand, have been adopted as suitable mechanisms for defining... 

Although Component-Based Development (CBD) is not a novel approach, it is still extensively used for building various types of software systems, and is expected to remain popular for the foreseeable future. There exist several software development methodologies that support the construction of component-based systems, and the domain has matured over the years. When viewed collectively, CBD methodologies have indeed addressed all the relevant issues; however, none of the methodologies covers all the aspects of component-based software development. A general methodology can resolve this through addressing the deficiencies while being customizable according to the specifics of the project...