Methodical Support for Model-Driven Software Engineering with Enterprise Models

This book elaborates a software development method for creating information systems from enterprise models, to achieve a close alignment between business processes, the structures of organizations, and the functionality offered by information systems supporting the organizations’ work. The method is designed as a generic framework to work with any enterprise modeling language, and to generate software for any target system platforms. Fundamental methodical challenges in transforming conceptual models to implementation artifacts are faced by involving auxiliary models into the software creation process, and splitting up the transformation procedure into multiple dedicated phases. Using this approach, the abstraction gap between conceptual enterprise models and technical implementation artifacts gets systematically bridged by methodical concepts, in order to perform an ontological turn from the bird’s-eye-view description perspective of enterprise models, to an internal perspective describing technical details of a software system. Prototypical implementation examples for illustrating the introduced concepts are included in the book and are available for download. They demonstrate how to use the method with model-transformations, validity checks, and domain-specific modeling languages inside an Eclipse development environment.