For the realization of this dissertation I am indebted to many people and organizations. The Academy of Finland, the Foundation for Economic Education, and the Technical Research Center of Finland have provided funding for the research. MetaCase Consulting Inc. provided vital connections to the case studies and has greatly increased my research motivation by allowing me to combine both the research and practice of method development.

The advice of my supervisor, Professor Kalle Lyytinen, has been inspiring and significant. It was he who encouraged me into research in the first place, and directed me towards the field of method engineering. I would like to extend my thanks to the external reviewers of the dissertation, professors Juhani Iivari and Richard Welke, and to Göran Goldkuhl, Matthias Jarke, Mauri Leppänen, who have commented on this work as it has progressed.

While carrying out this research I have been fortunate to work in the MetaPHOR project. In fact, the research problems addressed in this work would not have been possible to study to such an extent without the work carried out in the research group. My long term research colleagues, Steven Kelly, Pentti Marttiin, Matti Rossi and Kari Smolander have given valuable comments on this work and implemented the metaCASE tools applied in my research. Steven Kelly also assisted with the correction of the English in this dissertation. The other members of MetaPHOR project, including Janne Kaipala, Pentti Kerola, Janne Luoma, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen, Minna Koskinen, Hui Liu, Risto Pohjonen, Marko Somppi and Veli-Pekka Tahvanainen have all contributed in creating the favorable conditions for research within the project.

I would like to express my thanks to the metamodeling language developers, Arthur ter Hofstede, Michael Heym, Steven Kelly, Kari Smolander and John Venable, who have provided comments about metamodeling functionality and checked the metamodels I made. With respect to the practice of method development, I would like to thank several method developers and adapters, including Ari Jaaksi, Brian Henderson-Sellers, Harri Lindström, Hans Nissen and Pirkko Vesterinen, for their valuable discussions and insights into local method development.

Finally, I would like to thank my parents and my wife Marjut for supporting me throughout the whole research process, and especially Marjut for setting aside her own career to accompany me as I wrote up this thesis as a visiting researcher in RWTH Aachen, Germany.