Business Family Engineering. Does It Make Sense ?

Abstract

Nowadays most companies in whichever field have a software system that helps managing all the aspects of the company, from the strategic management to daily activities. Companies are in continuous evolution to adapt to market changes, and consequently, the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports it must also evolve. Thus, software companies are currently supporting this evolution with ad hoc techniques. We think that, as it is being done for traditional software systems (non-oriented to business process) in the software product line (SPL) field, institutionalized techniques for performing a systematic reuse of business processes across different businesses can be introduced. in this paper, we explore the feasibility of adapting SPL techniques, oriented to reuse software, to Business-Driven Development (BDD), oriented to reuse processes, across different businesses; we call this approach Business Family Engineering (BFE). As a result of our study, we show some of the problems we have identified and some of the key aspects needed to enable this new field.