Systematic Approach for Mapping Software Development Methods to the Essence Framework

The Essence framework has been recently defined as a basis for modeling various kinds of software development methods. The framework includes the necessary concepts to instantiate the software development methods. In this way a new method can be better understood, learned and compared with other methods. In practice, it is not straightforward to model a given software development method using the Essence framework. In this paper we provide a systematic approach for mapping methods to the elements of the Essence framework. To illustrate our approach, we use the mapping of the Nexus, a scaled agile approach, to the Essence framework. We report on the lessons learned and provide our conclusions.