Although the Method Engineering (ME) research community has reached considerable maturity, it has not yet been able to agree on the granularity and definition of the configurable parts of methods. This state of affairs is causing unnecessary confusion, especially with an ever increasing number of people contributing to ME research. There are several competing notions around, most significantly 'method fragments' and 'method chunks', but also 'method components' and 'process components' are used in some quarters and have also been widely published. Sometimes these terms are used interchangeably, but there appears to be important semantic and pragmatic differences. If the differences are unimportant, we should be able to come to an agreement on what construct to promote. Alternatively, the different constructs may serve different purposes and there is a need for them to coexist. If this is the case, it should be possible to pinpoint exactly how they are related and which are useful in what contexts. This panel is a step towards finding common ground in this area, which arguably is at the very core of ME.

Several approaches have been proposed to support situational method engineering (SME), each of them providing different techniques and using different basic concepts. In this work, we propose a framework for comparing SME approaches based on a generic SME process model. Three approaches are presented and compared by using this framework.

Despite the recent interest in scenarios, the development of new methods and tools for Requirements Engineering integrating scenario based approaches has been limited. This paper reports on four different processes developed from research undertaken as part of the CREWS project which the authors believe will improve scenario use and make it more systematic. Furthermore CREWS aims to integrate these approaches into a method for scenariobased requirements engineering. To achieve this objective and be able to include existing approaches such as use case analysis we develop a component based approach which reflects a shift towards a reuse-centric approach to method engineering. The paper presents CREWS method and metamethod knowledge through the implementation of an SGML database to store, retrieve and dynamically compose chunks of CREWS processes.