Managing the Co-Evolution of Software Applications with Business Requirements

业务流程描述了任务是如何执行和排序的。例如，在线图书订购业务流程由一组任务组成，例如选择图书、输入付款信息和提交订单。业务流程由支持业务的应用程序自动化。业务需求的快速变化迫使组织改进其业务流程并发展其应用程序，以满足新的客户需求并提高业务绩效。但是，业务应用程序的设计和实现很少能与不断变化的业务需求保持一致。因此，业务应用程序通常不够灵活，无法响应不断变化的需求。对业务流程的改进可能是微不足道的，因为应用程序可能不支持更改后的业务流程。而不是考虑软件开发和演化的活动独立于业务活动，拟议的研究计划努力弥合业务和技术世界之间的差距。该研究计划的目标包括：（1）通过利用业务流程和应用程序之间的可追溯性链接来提高业务流程和应用程序的质量;以及（2）提高从业务流程自动生成的业务应用程序的可维护性。拟议的研究计划是第一个提出工程方法，通过大规模的实证研究，业务流程和应用程序的维护和发展进行验证。该研究计划利用历史项目信息和可追溯性链接，以降低长期业务应用程序的维护成本。这项研究的结果将使加拿大软件业在高度竞争的全球软件市场中具有明显的竞争优势。该研究帮助组织调整其业务应用程序以适应新兴的业务需求，并通过快速传播新的业务需求到业务应用程序来提高其业务性能。我们预计，这个研究项目将在未来五年内培养3名博士生和3名硕士生。

A business process describes how tasks are executed and ordered. For instance, an on-line book ordering business process is composed of a set of tasks, such as selecting a book, entering payment information and submitting the order. A business process is automated by the supporting business application. Rapid changes to business requirements force organizations to improve their business processes and to evolve their applications in order to meet new customer requirements and enhance business performance. However, the design and implementation of business applications rarely evolve consistently with changing business needs. Therefore, the business applications are often not flexible enough to be changed to respond to the changing requirements. The improvement to the business processes can be marginal since the changed business processes may not be supported by the application. Instead of considering software development and evolution as activities independent from business activities, the proposed research program strives to bridge the gap between the business and technical worlds. The objectives of the proposed research program include: (1) improving the quality of business processes and applications by leveraging the traceability links between them; and (2) improving the maintainability of business applications that are automatically generated from business processes. The proposed research program is the first to propose engineered methodologies that are validated through large scale empirical studies for the maintenance and evolution of business processes and applications. The research program exploits historical project information and traceability links in an effort to reduce the maintenance cost of long-lived business applications. The results of this research will give the Canadian software industry a clear competitive advantage in a highly aggressive global software market. The research helps organizations adapt their business applications to emerging business needs and improve their business performance by rapidly propagating new business requirements to the business applications. We expect that this research program will train 3 PhD and 3 MSc students in the next five years.