Research Of Requirement-driven Approach To Enterprise Applications Evolution

The continuous changes of requirements during entire life circle bringenormous costs to the maintenance and evolution of Enterprise Applications(EAs), thus it is necessary for EAs to keep evolving to adapt the changingrequirements. The existing tools and methods alleviate these problems incertain prospective, however, there’re a few shortcomings in these methodssuch as inaccuracy of descriptions, hard to elicit models, low developmentefficiency or inflexibility facing incremental changes.To avoid those shortcomings and try to solve the evolution problems ofEAs from a more systematic view, a requirement-driven approach is proposedin this paper. The paper discusses the necessity and advantages ofrequirement-driven approach, researches the process of requirement-drivenevolution. The main research works of the approach are as follows：1）The approach introduces a formal requirement describing method,called Refined Use Cases (RUCs), to capture requirements and build modelsfor the enterprise application scenarios, gives a series of the incrementalmodifications according to the definitions of RUC, discusses the consistencies maintenances during the modification process by using pre-or post-conditionsduring the modification. ARefined Use Case Description Language (RUCDL)is proposed for describing the RUCs effectively.2）An increment-changeable conceptional model (CM) is also introducedin order to adapt the model evolution process of EAs. The paper discusses itsdefinition and meta-model, and researches the incremental modificationswhich are able to control the evolution of the CM, and also researches how toelicit and enrich the model information from RUCs by introducing modelingrules.3）The paper moves onto proposing a series of basic mapping rules and amodification mapping framework, and then researches how to propagate therequirements changes from RUC layer to CM layer through modificationsmapping process, which finally smooth the continuously incrementalevolution process of enterprise applications.4）Related tools including a RUCDL parser and a prototype of anenterprise application evolution environment are designed and implemented inthis paper. Acase study from an industry project is studied，which proves andverifies the effectiveness and efficiency of the approach.