Ideas on Enterprise Information Systems Development

This blog is devoted to ideas on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) development. It focuses on Lean Thinking, Agile Methods, and Free/Open Source Software, as means of improving EIS development and evolution, under a more practical than academical view. You may find here a lot of "thinking aloud" material, sometimes without scientific treatment... don't worry, this is a blog!
Every post is marked with at least one of Product or Process labels, meaning that they are related to execution techniques (programming and testing) or management techniques (planning and monitoring), respectively.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Business Process Driven Development - BPDD

At NSI we are working on adding Business Process (BP) representations to Behavior Driven Development (BDD). I mean, substituting the "classic" Given-When-Then (GWT) by some BP graphical representation, such as Petri Nets or UML Statechart Diagrams.

The core idea, already working as a proof of concept using  Woped, is to allow a final user to run a business process in a step by step way and then see the living system pop up as he/she clicks on the activity elements, such as edges in a Petri Net. In that way we provide executable documentation using BP graphical representations, delivering BDD to the realm of Enterprise Information Systems.

Initially, we thought of calling this extension to BDD "Business Process Driven Development" (BPDD), however, we realized that a lot of related but different methods use this name with many different meanings. Then I thought of other names, and leave to my readers the choice of the best one:


a)Common Language Driven Development (CLDD)
The use of common language for users and developers (yes, another name for UL...)
b)Business Language Driven Development (BLDD)
The use of the user's business language as a common language.
c)Shared Language Driven Development (SLDD)
The use of a shared language, resulting of an agreement between users and developers.


(b) is interesting because keep our focus on business systems. However, I think we can use the concept of UL for scientific systems, for instance. So "business" may not map well for these systems.
(c) is interesting because it shows that users and developers agreed to use a shared language.
Yes, I know that UL's definition may cover all that, but I don't want to call ULDD!

We prepared two technical reports and posted them at Arxiv.org, please check them and help us to find a nice name to this BDD extension:
a) Filling the Gap between Business Process Modeling and Behavior Driven Development
b) Mapping Business Process Modeling constructs to Behavior Driven Development Ubiquitous Language

PS: in fact I believe that the Ubiquitous Language (UL) is not a single language, but a composition of languages. For instance, we can mix mathematical formulas and plain text into a process representation so that this representation is the closest possible to the "real thing". In other words, since there are languages such as should-dsl, we could also have things like math-dsl, or logistics-dsl, used externally and internally.
I will go back to this later on...

1 comment:

  1. Fernando, great idea, but I think that for us to actually choose the best name, we should see an example of exactly what you want to develop.

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