Understand How Your Business Should Operate

The RUP approach proposes a notation and process to be used for business engineering that are very similar to those used for software development. This approach facilitates communication between teams analyzing the business and teams developing software. Business engineering is primarily done by larger projects or organizations. Note that some of these techniques also may be used by smaller teams , but focus on only the parts of the business that are the most unclear or crucial for the set of software systems you plan to develop. The information is possibly captured less formally , but the thought process you go through is the same.

You need to understand what business processes are required to support your business stakeholders. These processes are represented by business use cases, which describe the services your business will provide to your customers. The definition and the way business use cases are described are very similar to how software use cases are described, except the "system" being described is the entire business operation (a business system), not only the parts being automated. As an example, if your business is a store, your business use cases may be the following:

• Provide information about available products. Later, this can be implemented by salespersons in a store or by a Web site.

• Accept and process order. There may be many different software use cases to support this business use case, ranging from e-shopping to information systems supporting in-store salespersons.

The workflow of a business use case can be described textually in use-case descriptions as well as visually using UML diagrams (see Figure 15.2). You also describe the realization of those workflows in terms of how roles in the organization collaborate to execute the business process. Roles and deliverables of the process are represented by classes and objects in a business object model (see Figure 15.3).

Figure 15.2. Business Use-Case Model for Product Company. A business use-case model shows which business process (business use cases) is provided for which customers/business partners (business actors).

Figure 15.3. Business Object Model for Order. A business object model captures the responsibilities, organizational units, and important concepts and items within your business, and how they relate to each other. This figure shows how the concept Order relates to other concepts, such as Customer Profile and Product. A model of concepts only is sometimes called a domain model, since it provides a good understanding of the problem domain.

You also need to identify the applications needed to support the business processes. The RUP product provides a simple path for deriving software system requirements from the business use-case and business object model. ^[2] Coupling the development of software features with the business processes they support helps you understand the value various software features have for your business. Understanding the value of software features assists you in prioritizing work and investing project resources wisely to maximize business benefits when building the software systems. This is an area where many business-engineering approaches are lacking.

^[2] See Guidelines: Going from Business Models to Systems under Business Modeling, in the RUP product.