The main motivation of my research is: (i) to propose a methodology based on applying SPL ideas for the systematization of the development of BIS across a several number of businesses that shares common business processes, namely Business Family Engineering (BFE); and (ii) to de¯ne the methodology fragment focused on providing a core architecture of the family, namely Business Family Domain Engineering. For that purpose, this figure shows the software process of
our approach using the SPEM notation (http://www.omg.org/technology/documents/formal/spem.htm)
As shown in Figure, in this software process there are two main activities: (i) Business Family Domain Engineering, where we build the BFE core architecture, namely Core Process Framework, and the Business Family Variaability Summary; and (ii) Business Family Application Engineering, where we obtain specific business information systems, that are described by means of execution languages, such as Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). It is important to say that our scenario is by now limited to binary relationships between features and processes, in other words, a feature can not represent a set of processes.
In addition, we have identified two diferent ways to build a business family: top-down and bottom-up. In the top-down approach, we define the set of businesses and processes from scratch and apply the normal sequence of BFE software process. In bottom-up approach, we can not apply the normal sequence of the software process defined due to we have a set of businesses or processes defined in feature models previously to apply BFE software process. In our research we only focus in top-down.
Next figure describes the Business Family Domain Engineering software process using SPEM. It is composed by three diferent activities: (i) Domain Requirements Engineering, that is focused on capturing the requirements of the problem domain, (ii) Domain Design, that is focused on exploring the variability of the system and providing the core architecture; and (iii) Domain Implementation, that is focused on defining the implementation and test details of the
architecture, such as persistence or presentation layers.
