Approach and model for business components specification

Abstract

The development of software through reusable parts that are thoroughly certified for their intended purposes is emerging as a new way of IS engineering. Thus, it seems necessary to propose design tools for components engineering. Research works on “components” focus rather on the implementation of components. We propose a model and guidelines for the specification of conceptual business components. Because, we notice it is possible to describe a business object in many ways, we believe that a business component should integrate variability. Such variability is necessary to make a component reusable in different contexts. The paper presents a business component model which allows identifying, abstracting and contextualizing this variability. “Reuse graphs” enable the expression of all the structures of one object while the “context” indicates, for each structure, the purpose intended by the structure and the constraints it solves. We also propose a software tool that manages business components as XML documents and that supports the reuse process.