An ontological-based approach to analyze software production methods

In the Information Systems (IS) area, countless modelling techniques exist to deal with the different perspectives of reality. Many software development methods propose many languages to make descriptions. How to align them correctly following an ontological approach is still an open problem. Instead of facing how to incrementally improve pre-existing methods, more and more proposals are introduced time after time, based on different paradigms or combining (in an apparently innovative way) current IS concepts. We seek to establish a conceptual framework for IS that helps to reason about different software development approaches. In this work, starting from a conceptual framework built on the basis of the FRISCO proposal, we explain how to trace the conceptual alignment of software production methods; that is, how the modelling primitives proposed by the method map to the elements of our reference framework. As a practical example, we align part of the Rational Unified Process, a widespread general-purpose software development method, to show how the different pieces of the method fit conceptually in the proposed ontology.