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.
