Business-oriented model driven development of service oriented architectures

Context & motivation: The success in the adoption of innovative technologies and new software systems inside an organization is related not only to technical problems. Several authors pointed out the importance of business modelling in software development in order to understand for instance: how the organizational environment relates to its software infrastructure and how the development of a new software-intensive service for a company implies changes in the company business and in its processes. The growing complexity of organizations, such as: networked and information-dependent companies; globalization of the companies structures; evanescent services provided by companies, increase the uncertainty in software projects. Software engineering successes in turn became more and more bounded to the understanding of the organizational assets and their relation to the software. Question/problem: How can we model the business in requirements engineering phases and, at the same time, enable business-level concepts (such as strategies, goals, trust, etc.) to relate to system-level artifacts? Principal ideas/results: Our aim is to define a framework that helps software engineers to develop their systems in what we named the business-oriented approach. The business-oriented approach to software development has been defined as an approach that carefully consider the processes, actors and goal of the business in developing a software system and also analyzes the changes that the software will cause to the organization itself. In order to define such a framework we exploit model driven engineering that helps in managing high level abstractions for the software. In particular, our work relies on the service architectural paradigm that is particularly suitable in modeling socio-technical systems. Contribution: In order to define our framework we define: a method; a framework of technologies and a set of tools. Our method, named the Enterprise-Service-Implementation (ESI), starts from the requirements of the organization and the system, it derives a platform independent service model that can be in turn transformed into platform specific implementations. ESI exploits the service concept as an intermediate abstraction. Model driven technologies help us to translate concepts from the business domain, such as goals, into services concretely bounded to a specific implementation platform. A framework of technologies and languages helps us to implement the ESI method. We exploit and combine: a goaloriented language named Si*; UML Use Cases and a business process modeling language named Buiness Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), in order to model the business from different perspectives. We develop two tools to put into practice our framework. TheWiki Requirements tool (WikiReq) is a collaborative system and business requirements management Web application based on a wiki. WikiReq uses semantic wiki features for requirements gathering and management and is able to export semantically annotated knowledge to the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The Service Modeling Tool for Eclipse (SMOTE) is an Eclipse IDE application that exploits the Eclipse model driven architecture in order to perform the models transformations needed in our framework. We present a case studio where we experienced our framework in the challenging domain of Civil Protection. We present first results on the adoption of our approach concerning both the stakeholders experience and quantitative data.