Representing Runtime Variability in Business-Driven Development Systems

Business-Driven Development(BDD) is a research field that provides techniques and mechanisms for designing software systems starting from the business processes of the companies. Companies are in continuous evolution to adapt to market changes, thus, current process engineers redesign the processes every time that is needed using ad hoc techniques. This situation motivates that these changes, called runtime variability, must be managed. Some authors have used Software Product Lines (SPL) ideas to manage it. Current approaches for documenting runtime variability in SPL and BDD, proposes different model representations. Unfortunately, we have determined that the expressiveness level in BDD is not adequate, and that SPL solutions needs for adaptation to BDD context for describing under which circumstances a business evolves. In this paper, we present a model for representing runtime variability in BDD systems. The main contributions of this proposal are: (i) it presents the enough expressiveness level for representing runtime variability; and (ii) process engineers can represent and understand under which events a business evolves and how this evolution is managed, which is not present in current approaches. We call this approach Product Evolution Model (PEM).