A business process‐driven approach for generating software modules

Abstract

SUMMARYBusiness processes describe the business operations of an organization and capture the business requirements. Business applications provide automated support for an organization to achieve their business objectives. A software modular structure represents the structure of a business application and shows the distribution of functionality to software components. However, mainstream design approaches rely on software architects' craftsmanship to derive software modular structures from business requirements. Such a manual approach is inefficient and often leads to inconsistency between business requirements and business applications. To address this problem, we propose an approach to derive software modular structures from business processes. We use clustering algorithms to analyze dependencies among data and tasks captured in business processes and group the strongly dependent tasks and data into a software component. A case study is conducted to generate software modular structures from a collection of business processes from the industrial setting and open‐source development domain. The experiment results illustrate that our proposed approach can generate meaningful software modular structures with high modularity. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.