Maintainable systems with a business object approach

The concept of Business Objects (BOs) has been recently promoted as a new way of exploiting object‐orientation for achieving large‐grain reuse. In this paper, we address the issue of how to effectively re‐engineer business software applications using BOs as a reuse technique. To this end, we first identify the reuse features of business objects and then compare them with other reuse techniques. In addition, we show that software re‐engineering can be more economical when business objects are used. Our work also provides guidance on how to develop and use a Business Object Architecture (BOA), which is shared by a group of interrelated and interdependent software applications. We argue that such architecture allows for more efficient reuse and better maintainability and it is illustrated by means of a case study in a realistic manufacturing environment.