Towards developing software from a description of the business processes that they support

Source of subsidy

CRSNG – Subvention à la découverte

Professors involved

• Hafedh Mili (UQAM)
• Javier González-Huerta
• Abderrahmane Leshob (UQAM)

Students

• Anis Boubaker

Summary

Organizations build information systems to support their business processes. One would expect organizations that use the same business processes to be able to use or reuse the same IT infrastructure. This may be true at the enterprise architecture level but does not translate into reuse at the more concrete software artifact level, where most of the IT resources are spent. There are many reasons for this. First, there is a wide variety of business processes for doing anything, from procurement, to logistics, to financials, which may share a common core, but differ in the detail. Second, for any given business process, there are different levels of IT support, ranging from a simple recording of the activities of an essentially human process, to full process automation. Model-driven development [BROW04], and software reuse in general, have achieved much progress in deriving software models at development stage n, from software models at stage n-1. They have done this either by codifying good solutions to recurrent problems (patterns, analysis, architectural, or design), or by codifying the transformations (from platform-independent/PIM to platform-specific models/PSM, or from PSM to code as supported by CASE tools), or both. However, much remains to be done for the transformation from business process models (as computation independent models, or CIMs) to analysis software models (PIM)s. This is the transformation that we propose to investigate in this work.