Systematic Derivation of Class Diagrams from Communication-Oriented Business Process Models

摘要

Enterprise information systems can be developed following a model driven paradigm. This way, models that represent the organisational work prac tice are used to produce models that represent the information system. Current software development methods are starting to provide guidelines for the con struction of conceptual models, taking as input requirements models. This paper proposes the integration of two methods: Communication Analysis (a commu nication-oriented requirements engineering method [1]) and the OO-Method (a model-driven object-oriented software development method [2]). For this pur pose, a systematic technique for deriving class diagrams from business process models is proposed. The business process specifications (which include mes sage structures) are processed in order to obtain class diagram views, which are integrated to create the class diagram incrementally. Then, using the ouvanova framework, software source code can be generated automatically. The paper also discusses the advantages and current limitations of the technique. Results show that, although there is room for improvement, the technique is feasible and it does facilitate the creation of the class diagram.