Éric Lefebvre

Business process modeling languages: Sorting through the alphabet soup

Requirements capture is arguably the most important step in software engineering, and yet the most difficult and the least formalized one [Phalp and Shepperd 2000]. Enterprises build information systems to support their business processes. Software engineering research has typically focused on the development process, starting with user requirements—if that—with business modeling often confused with software system modeling [Isoda 2001]. Researchers and practitioners in management information systems have long recognized that understanding the business processes that an information system must support is key to eliciting the needs of its users (see e.g., Eriksson and Penker 2000]), but lacked the tools to model such business processes or to relate such models to software requirements. Researchers and practitioners in business administration have long been interested in modeling the processes of organizations for the purposes of understanding, analyzing, and improving such processes [Hammer and Champy 1993], but their models were often too coarse to be of use to software engineers. The advent of ecommerce and workflow management systems, among other things, has led to a convergence of interests and tools, within the broad IT community, for modeling and enabling business processes. In this article we present an overview of business process modeling languages. We first propose a categorization of the various languages and then describe representative languages from each family.

Compositional structured component model: handling selective functional composition

Software component technology has been promoted as an innovative means to tackle the issues of software reuse, software quality and, software development complexity. Several component models (CORBA, .Net, JavaBeans) have been introduced, yet certain issues and limitations inherent to components still need to be addressed. As software components with hosts of functionalities tend to be coarse to large-grained in size and since the set of functionalities required by an application varies according to the particular application context, an excessive number of unwanted functionalities might be generated by such components within the application. We present the compositional structured component model (CSCM) designed to handle the issue of unwanted component functionalities and to provide a flexible approach for easier customization, adaptation, and reuse. The CSCM model is designed to handle this issue via component functional composition using metadata composition instances, which allow selective composition of a components required functionalities.

The Need to Evaluate Strategy and Tactics before the Software Development Process Begins

Experience has shown that poor strategy or bad tactics adopted when planning a software project influence the final quality of that product, even when the whole development process is undertaken with a quality approach. This paper addresses the quality attributes of the strategy and tactics of the software project plan that should be in place in order to deliver a good software product. It presents an initial work in which a set of required quality attributes is identified to evaluate the quality of the strategy and tactics of the software project plan, based on the Business Motivation Model (BMM) and the quality attributes available in the ISO 9126 standard on software product quality.