Design of software applications using generic business components

Abstract

One frequent cause of software project failure is the mismatch between the (business) requirements and the actual functionality of the delivered (software) application. An approach is proposed in this paper, for design of software, basing consistently this design on prior business process modeling. The alignment between these two tasks is realized in a component-based way, by deriving the software model from identified (generic) business components, thus - taking advantage of the benefits of object-orientation. The paper introduces not only the concepts of the approach but also elaborated views on how it could be implemented using particular software design and business process modeling techniques. A way to implement the approach is through UML $the standard language for designing software. The suggested approach is expected to be a useful contribution to the knowledge on aligning business process modeling and software design.