Notice : In the first section and the previous section of this case study, we have respectively shown how to structure 'Business Capabilities" and model business processes on the basis of business goals. This section shows the following steps :

 

 

Step 4 - How to draft the backbone of the "Goal-Driven SOA" ?

Step 5 and 6 - Description of use case and service behaviours that are to be plugged into the SOA backbone

 

 

 

 

Step 4 :  Draft the backbone of the Goal-Driven Service Oriented Architecture

 

 

This step allows us to elaborate a first draft of the architectural backbone of service and use case components at the PIM (Platform Independent Model) level of the MDA.

 

A draft of the Goal-Driven SOA backbone on the basis of the Computation Independent Model (business level) specifications is given in the figure below according to the UML 2 component diagram notations...

 

 

 

Figure 6:    A draft of the backbone of the Goal-Driven SOA transformed at the MDA's PIM level on the basis of MDA's CIM level specifications of the business owners

 

 

 

Notice : All the internal structures (use cases, services, service points,...) of business capabilities previously described by the business analysts are kept conform to their original descriptions with traceability !

 

 

 

 

 

Step 5  : Model underlying behaviours of use case and service components

 

In this step, we describe underlying automated actions of the processes that require actor / system interactions for their realizations.

 

The below activity diagram illustrates a realization scenario for the action Enter Visitor of the process Register Visitor described in figure 4.

 

The UC and GdS component behaviours shown at the bottom side may be automatically generated on the basis of actions specified within each of them.

 

 

 

Figure 7 :   Behavioral description and generation of the use case (UC_Cmp) and service (GdS_Cmp) components that realize the action Enter Visitor of the business process Register Visitor

 

 

 

 

Step 6 : Plug-in the use case and service behaviours into the backbone of the GD-SOA and test

 

This step focuses on the insertion of the appropriate software behaviours into the components of the architecture.

 

In this perspective, behaviours of the other architectural layer components such as the presentation and data storage layers have to be implemented on the basis of the previous specifications.

 

Finally, the previous architectural components (GUI, use case, service, entity objects) are plugged into appropriate structures of the architectural backbone of the system for their integration with other components of the architecture.

 

The figure below illustrates the plug-in of the previous UC and GDS components into the system architecture.

 

 

 

 

Figure 8 :  Use Case and Service components are plugged into their respective parent components within the goal-driven architectural backbone of the system 

 

 

 

 

Animated : Click to visualize how to deal with changes on the Goal-Driven Service Oriented Architecture, ...

 

 

3         Conclusion

 

The steps of the Goal-Driven SOA Development Process illustrated in this presentation allowed us to explain how to align IT applications on the basis of business goals, their underlying means and processes according to BMM and MDA concepts.

 

By bridging these concepts throughout identification of SOA services and application use cases then ensuring their separate traceability toward software implementation, the purpose of the Goal-Driven SOA process is to allow stakeholders to adapt IT applications to the changes swiftly and coherently using goal structures, thus to capitalize on their business knowledge using a goal-driven service oriented architecture [GDDP4MDA].

 

Goal-Driven Development Patterns [Patterns] that support the infrastructure of this SOA process aim to help organizations to increase their business agility without worrying about alignment issues of IT applications.  

 

This way, business owners focus on the enhancement of their daily business process behaviours, describing precisely underlying behaviours of supporting services and UC components, whilst end-users of the system can finaly concentrate their efforts on their interactions with the system as they should naturally do.

 

  Detailed information about relationships between BMM toward SOA Services, is provided on "From BMM to SOA".

 

 

References

[BMM] : "Business  Motivation Model - Business governance in a volatile world" of the Business Rules Group voted by the OMG in September 2005 http://www.businessrulesgroup.org/second_paper/BRG-BMM.pdf ,

[Visibility of the Rules] :  Stan Hendryx - Business Rules - BPTrends / BPT http://www.businessprocesstrends.com/publicationfiles/10-04%20COL%20OMG%20Montreal%20-%20Hendryx.pdf  , October 2004

[Business-Oriented Foundation] :  Ulrich Homann - MSDN - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa479368.aspx#servorient_topic3, February 2006

[Business Capabilities View] : The OMG's Business Architecture Working Group http://bawg.omg.org/business_architecture_overview.htm

[Business Rules vs. Business Requirements] : Gladys S.W. Lam - Business Rules Journal, Vol. 7, No 5, May 2006), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2006/b290

[Service Architecture - SOA : Why Sale isn't process driven] : Steve Jones - http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-sales-isnt-process-driven.html

[Becoming Strategy Driven] : Ronald G. Ross, "Becoming Strategy-Driven:  Moving Beyond the Tired Notion of 'Business Alignment'," Business Rules Journal , Vol. 9, No. 12 (Dec. 2008), URL:   http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2008/b452.html

[GDDP4MDA] Birol Berkem, Goal Driven Development for MDA - OMG's Technical Meeting in Athens http://www.omg.org/cgi-bin/doc?omg/2005-04-05 , April 2005

[Align-IT-with-BMM] Birol Berkem, How to align IT with the Changes using UML and according to BMM ? - Journal of Object Technology, vol. 5, no. 2, March-April 2006 , http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2006_03/column9

[Patterns] How to increase your business agility with UML and MDA? (White paper on the Goal-Driven Development Patterns and Processes) http://www.goobiz.com

[TOGAF] What kind of "architecture" does TOGAF deal with ?: http://www.opengroup.org/public/arch/p1/togaf_faq.htm#six

 

 

 

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Birol Berkem (Ph.D), GooBiz