Towards quality-aware development and evolution of enterprise information systems

Abstract

Information systems have been used to support business processes for a long time. Consequently, there has been an ongoing trend towards connecting and integrating the isolated IT solutions of enterprises into coherent systems in order to support the seamless execution of business processes electronically. Due to the often business critical nature of the processes such systems need to adhere to service level agreements that guarantee quality aspects such as a specific throughput or availability for a given process. However, a key weakness of existing development approaches for information systems is that they mostly focus on functional aspects of system development and lack an integrated view between different stakeholders and views in development, e.g. between business process management and software architecture. In this paper we introduce a novel approach for universal und uniform modeling of non-functional system properties that bridges the four areas of business and use case modeling as well as architecture and component design. By means of an example process, we first identify the key weaknesses of existing development methodologies and then derive the challenges for an improved approach. After that we describe the central aspects of our envisaged composition approach for non-functional requirements and how it might be supported by a novel breed of CASE tools in the future.