2007 BusinessProcessDevelopmentLifeC

(Papazoglou & van den Heuvel, 2007) ⇒ Michael P. Papazoglou, and Willem-Jan van den Heuvel. (2007). “Business Process Development Life Cycle Methodology.” In: Communications of the ACM Journal, 50(10). doi:10.1145/1290958.1290966

Subject Headings: Business Process Management.

Notes

Cited By

Quotes

Abstract

An innovative roadmap brings together the worlds of business processes and Web services, harnessing their power to construct industrial-strength business applications.

Introduction

Web services are rapidly becoming the defacto distributed enterprise computing technology for realizing and managing multi-party business processes [5]. By now, most enterprises have gained some early experience in developing internal Web services in a first attempt to leverage their legacy assets and to accelerate development and integration of their enterprise applications. However, most of today's enterprises are still far from benefiting from the full-fledged potential of Web service technology embodied in its ability to mix-and-match internal and external services alike.

In fact, it is common practice for most enterprises to develop their Web services by simply placing a thin SOAP / WSDL / UDDI layer on top of existing enterprise applications or software components. This is in no way sufficient for implementing and managing commercial-strength, service-enabled enterprise applications. While simple (internal) Web services may be constructed that way, a development life cycle methodology is of crucial importance to design, construct, monitor, and manage enterprise SOA applications supporting existent business process ecosystems that are highly complex and agile in nature. This article describes the insights of a methodology and roadmap that assists service providers and service aggregators in assembling multi-party business processes, such as invoicing and inventory control, from Web services.

Methodology Roadmap

The service-oriented business process development methodology is based on a roadmap that comprises one preparatory phase to plan development, and five distinct phases that concentrate on business processes: analysis and design (A&D), construction and testing, provisioning, deployment, and execution and monitoring (see Figure 1).

The stepwise transition through these phases tends to be incremental and iterative in nature and should accommodate revisions in situations where the scope cannot be completely defined a priori. This allows an approach that is one of continuous invention, discovery, and implementation with each iteration, forcing the development team to drive the software development artifacts closer to completion in a predictable and repeatable manner. This approach considers multiple realization scenarios for business processes and Web services that take into account both technical and business concerns.

The basic functioning of the methodology is exemplified by means of an order management process that involves a client, a seller, and a trusted third party. This process is organized as follows. On receiving a purchase order from a client, five tasks are executed concurrently at the seller's site: checking the credit worthiness of the customer, determining whether or not an ordered part is available in the product inventory, calculating the final price for the order and billing the customer, selecting a shipper, and scheduling the production and shipment for the order. While some of the processing can proceed concurrently, there are control and data dependencies between these tasks. For instance, the customer's creditworthiness must be ascertained before accepting the order, the shipping price is required to finalize the price calculation, and the shipping date is required for the complete fulfillment schedule.

Services that are orchestrated inside a process should be loosely coupled to each other, avoiding interdependencies at the level of data or control logic.

Design Guidelines

Business processes developed on the basis of existing or newly coded services must rely on sound service design principles to ensure autonomous, self-contained and modular business processes with clearly defined boundaries and discrete service endpoints. Two key principles serve as the foundation for service - and business-process design: service coupling and cohesion.

…

References

;

	Author	volume	Date Value	title	type	journal	titleUrl	doi	note	year
2007 BusinessProcessDevelopmentLifeC	Michael P. Papazoglou Willem-Jan van den Heuvel			Business Process Development Life Cycle Methodology				10.1145/1290958.1290966		2007