6 Variability Modeling and Product Derivation

Nowadays, process oriented software systems, like many business information systems, don’t exist only in one single version, which covers the whole target market. Instead, many different variants of the system exist, which are specialized according to diverging customer needs. Until now, the corresponding customization has to be done manually, being a time-consuming and error-prone task. However, the ability to rapidly and cost-effectively develop and deploy customer tailored system variants is crucial to the competitiveness of companies developing business software. In order to cope with these challenges, techniques for the efficient production of similar software systems have been developed. These techniques, known as software product family engineering [1], have already been applied successfully in several enterprises [2]. However, up to now the investigation of product family engineering techniques for families of process oriented software, in short process family engineering, has been widely neglected. In this chapter we therefore present our findings in the area of process family architectures for e-business systems, described as variant-rich process models in the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) [3] as well as product derivation issues regarding the particularities in process family engineering. This chapter is structured as follows: In section 6.2 we give a brief introduction to some basic concepts and describe in section 6.3 their application to an ebusiness process family. Section 6.4 introduces an approach for variability modeling in e-business process family architectures and for the automization and consistency maintenance during the derivation of process family members. In section 6.5 we in E-Business Process Families