Handbook of object-oriented business design

Document presentation

This document aims at making truly autonomous the "business" layer of "Management Information Systems", by exposing a business design method using a language derived from UML 2.0.

What do we call “Management Information System”?

This wording refers to any organization handling only poorly structured objects (Boolean values, character strings or numbers), by opposition in particular to those which handle information of a more complex kind: vectors, matrices, geometrical figures (“windows”…), images, sounds…

What do we call “business design”?

The wording "business design” (or "functional" design) stands for the description of:

the actions actors may perform: update data, select items, browse values…
the results these same actors may perceive: Automatic update of data, information flows directed towards the outside of the system: creations of documents, emission of signals...

… and we exclude in particular from this “business design”:

The “Technical” features of the system, i.e. the features which are not essential to describe the results users might perceive (typically, the physical design of databases)
The organization itself, i.e. the way operation instances are assigned to employees or business departments.

A “business design” approach may be useful even when no "Information Technology" aspects are involved. However, some of the concepts we present will be useful only for the sake of automation.

Link of the document with UML standards

From the "scope" point of view, the formalism we present is a subpart of UML 2.0, since UML's scope extends to all aspects of any Information System, whereas we limit ourselves to business design.

But on the other hand, this formalism may be viewed as an extension of UML, since:

first, UML does not provide the means of formalizing all information system components
moreover, UML defines a formal syntax, without addressing the more difficult matter of the links between model and "real world".

The present method, on the contrary, mitigates these gaps, in particular by introducing new concepts (some of them "specializations" of classes from the UML meta-model)

Strong points

Unlike UML, which does not propose any formal syntax to define the body of methods, the formalism we propose enables to describe in an entirely formalized way 100% of an Information System (i.e. data and processing)
The fact the scope of this formalism does not extend beyond the “business” layer makes it much simpler than full UML. In particular, it may be used by employees without any skills at all in Information Technology.
Unlike UML, which is a pure formal syntax:
- We address the question “how?” by supplementing the presentation of the formalism by methodological advices. For instance we try to answer such questions as “when is it necessary to replace a class with an association?”
- We deal with all semantic aspects of business design, answering for example such questions as:
  
  How to define clearly data?
  
  How to choose data names ?
Proposal of an original and simple formalism for defining how operations are triggered, allowing the designer to define it by the "expected results" of the operation.

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