Worksheet-Driven UMM Modeling of B2B Services

In the development process of a B2B system it is crucial that the business experts are able to express and evaluate agreements and commitments between the partners and that the software engineers get all necessary information to bind the private process interfaces to the public ones. UN/CE-FACT´s modeling methodology (UMM) is a UML profile for developing B2B processes. The formalisms introduced by UMM´s stereotypes facilitate the communication with the software engineers. However, business experts - who usually have a very limited understanding of UML - prefer expressing their thoughts and evaluating the results by plain text descriptions. In this paper we describe an approach that presents an equivalent of the UMM stereotypes and tagged values in text-based templates called worksheets. This strong alignment allows an integration into a UMM modeling tool and ensures consistency. We show how a specially designed XML-based worksheet definition language allows customization to special needs of certain business domains. Furthermore, we demonstrate how information kept in worksheets may be used for the semi-automatic generation of pattern-based UMM artifacts.