Business Modeling with Client-Oriented Requirements Strategy

Abstract

Rational unified process (RUP) (Jacobson, Booch, & Rumbaugh, 1999) is an iterative, incremental and use case driven methodology. RUP starts the software development with the requirements capture stage, taking into account that “the major challenge is that the customer, who we assume to be primarily a non-computer specialist, must be able to read and understand the result of requirements capture. To meet this challenge we must use the language of the customer to describe these results” (Jacobson et al., 1999, p. 113). As requirements are originated from the system’s context, RUP proposes the definition of it through a business model, more concretely, a business use cases model and a business objects model. There are several approaches to enhance this first stage of the RUP development. In this article, the author describes the most important proposals and briefly presents her strategy that defines a set of activities and heuristics to define a UML conceptual object model starting from stakeholder oriented requirements models. These models describe the overall context in which the software will be developed and operated, known as universe of discourse (Leite & Leonardi, 1998). The strategy enhances traceability (Pinheiro, 2000) between requirements and RUP models.