Abstract
Business patterns are powerful, high-level constructs that provide a natural and well-structured way of both understanding and specifying businesses and their rules. To be of use, business specifications have to be presented in an abstract and precise manner, and this paper shows how to do just that. Key concepts include business invariants and operations, and a higher level notion of “business pattern”. Specifications built in this way can be parameterized and reused in various business contexts. Business patterns in particular promise to be extremely helpful as a basis for systematic business analysis and subsequent implementation of the results of this analysis. We have successfully used these concepts and constructs in our engagements with (insurance) customers (Kilov et al., 1996).
The motivation for our work is to allow the production of complete, rigorous business specifications understandable by both business users and system developers. These specifications require rigorous expressions of semantics — that is, assertions — rather than loose, “intuitive,” descriptions. We present different kinds of reusable and abstract specification fragments — patterns — such as “action” and “module” patterns, which have different characteristics. We include examples of both elementary patterns — such as “composition” — and nonelementary patterns — such as “information gathering” and “joint ownership”. Unlike typical programming constructs, instantiations of business patterns are inherently interactive and so must adapt to their changing environment.
‘Alice had never been in a court of justice before, but she had read about them in books, and she was quite pleased to find that she knew the name of nearly everything there. “That’s the judge,” she said to herself, “because of his great wig.”
“And that’s the jury-box,” thought Alice; “and those twelve creatures,” (she was obliged to say “creatures, you see, because some of them were animals, and some were birds,) “I suppose they are the jurors.“’
Lewis Carroll. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
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Kilov, H., Simmonds, I.D. (1996). Business patterns: reusable abstract constructs for business specification. In: Humphreys, P., Bannon, L., McCosh, A., Migliarese, P., Pomerol, JC. (eds) Implementing Systems for Supporting Management Decisions. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34967-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-34967-1_15
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