The importance of Business Transactions: Business Services 2.0

My research partners, Joaquin Peña and Jose Bocanegra, are currently working on improve the modeling and implementation of business transactions, using MDD and SOC. Their contributions are in businessservices20.com

Business transactions are acquiring a special importance because provide an abstract view of the interactions that take place among organizations for the accomplishment of a business objective.

Although business transactions are seen as one of the key elements for making the Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) vision a reality, we have discovered, through an initial review of the literature, that the proposals for the modelling of business transactions have a set of weakness that can be synthesized in the following two drawbacks: on the one hand, there is important information that business transactions models should expose to cover the information need from a economical and software point of view, but that is not taken into account in the proposed models, limiting its expressiveness. On the other hand, there is not a proposal for the automatic transformation of those models into an executable system.

CAISE 2010 paper available (under revision)

Yesterday, we have performed the submission of our paper: "A Methodological Framework for Obtaining the Core Architecture of Business Information Systems Families" to CAISE 2010.

Abstract: Nowadays large organizations are the result of the interrelation of many business units which tend to be managed based on its business processes. The development of the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports these organizations is a complex task, due to the existence of different versions of the same process, namely core process, tailored in terms of each unit that executes it. Thus, organizations lost the matching between each version and the original. It implies problems in the maintenance of process specifications, that drives to an inaccurate execution of the business strategies of the organization. The introduction of Software Product Lines (SPL) techniques into the development of Business Information Systems (BIS) is expected to become a new development paradigm, of what we call Business Families, maximizing reuse and dealing with variability on process definitions. Current SPL-based proposals do not solve the identified problems, because the proposed design of the reusable core specification is not performed in a systematic way that maintains its traceability with derived processes. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a methodological framework that taking into account the identified drawbacks makes feasible to obtain, systematically, the core architecture of a Business Information System Family, composed by the core process and the extra information needed to derive, systematically too, each version. We exemplify our approach with reference to a real-life E-Government case study.

BPM 2010 CfP

BPM'10 is the 8th Conference on Business Process Management and it is considered the most distinguished specialized forum for researchers in BPM.

Call for papers

More info ...

We are referenced as a bibliography on new research projects

We are very proud to know that our article From Feature Models to Business Processes has been referenced in the recommended bibliography of proposed work: Modelagem de Variabilidade em Processos de Negócio at the University of Pernambuco by Carina Frota Alves

E-Goverment Case Study

This case study focuses on the application of the Business Family Engineering (BFE) approach in the context of developing a family of processes intended to support E-administration tasks. For that purpose, we focus on the study of a defined set of administrative procedures so telematics in the context of general government. Specifically, the objective of this case study is to evaluate the feasibility of BFE for the reuse of these definitions in several public entities.

Andalussian Goverment defined, in context of the project W@ndA, a set of telematic procedures that are based in both legal and technological framework strong enough. Due to the need for compliance with Law 11/2007, University of Seville has begun the development of the definition of its procedures in telematics and evaluates the possibility to reuse part or all of the framework defined by the Andalussian Goverment.

Once the requirements specification document is defined, we will obtain the variability summary and the basic business process core specificacion. Subsequently, defined by means of choreography modelling, the collaboration scenarios for the family will be obtained.

Next step is to explore how many business process specifications from core will be used by the University of Seville. For that purpose we explore its commonality percentage and redesign the core for this instance (such as Application Engineering in the SPL field). Finally, we detect that only Digital Authentication and Digital Signature business process definitions will be reused.

In our final definition we can see that several existing elements, business processes and software applications from Andalussian Goverment framework can be reused.

Eclipse BPMN Modeler Webminar

Abstract: The BPMN modeler is a pure Eclipse product. Its semantic model is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, it uses the Graphical Modeling Framework to run its editor. It has quite a few more things bundled into it though - we made sure to add a validation builder that creates markers on invalid BPMN diagrams headlessly. We also tweaked and configured the modeler against GMF so we could use the best of the tools it provides. The BPMN modeler is also meant to be embedded into your product. It features a simple drag and drop mechanism to annotate the diagram shapes. It is specifically oriented to be rebranded and integrated into complex products.

The webinar will present the BPMN language, the BPMN modeler features, and will detail some of its little additions.

Total running time 49:13 minutes

http://live.eclipse.org/node/657

PhD Research Report Camera Ready

Yesterday, I presented my PhD Research Report in the context of the PhD programme: "Technology and Software Engineering" in the Dpt. Languages and Computer Systems of University of Seville.

These are the final camera ready version of my report and slides.

PhD Research Report (Camera Ready Version)

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.

Slides (Final Version) (20 minutes of presentation)

View more documents from Ildefonso Montero.