Enterprise Applications: From Requirements to Design

We provide a method to systematically develop enterprise application architectures from problem descriptions. The problem descriptions are based on Jackson’s problem frame approach (Jackson, 2001). For enterprise applications, we have developed a specialized problem frame that takes the specifics of such applications into account (Choppy & Reggio, 2006). In particular, new domain types – such as business worker and business object – are introduced. We describe the requirements through problem diagrams that are instances of the enterprise application frame and of other problem frames. In addition to Jackson’s problem frame approach, we represent the business model underlying the business application by a domain knowledge diagram. Such a diagram identifies the domains relevant for the business process to be automated and states how they are related. It serves to analyze the business process to be automated and helps to construct the appropriate instances of the enterprise application frame, thus obtaining the problem diagrams. From the problem diagrams, we derive two kinds of specifications: a behavioral specification describes how the automated business process is carried out. It can be expressed using activity or sequence diagrams. A structural specification describes the classes to be implemented and the operations they provide. This specification is expressed as a class diagram, where all operations are specified in OCL. With these different models, we have described the software development problem in a detailed way, taking into account the specifics of business applications. This makes it possible to develop a suitable software architecture in a systematic way. We proceed similarly as described in earlier work (Choppy, Hatebur, & Heisel, 2011), where we derive software architectures from problem descriptions for arbitrary software. In this work, we make use of the fact that the software developement problem