Studies On Software Architecture And Development Process Of Enterprise Information System

Being the development of information technology around world and information innovation in enterprise, especially the emergence of enterprise computing propelled by the development of network technology and internet, the scale and complexity of information system (IS) are increasing dramatically, and also the cycle life of system development becomes longer. Moreover, because of the increasing intension of the competition among industries and among enterprises, the enterprise information system (EIS) becomes a key element of core competition. However, the mutability and complexity of requirement of EIS, which probably make it out of control, increases the difficulty of developing IS. And so, developing a set of IS products adaptive to mutable market requirement is the key element of core competition of the independent software vendors of IS products.By two case study, the paper analyzes the problems occurred in constructing and applying IS, which focus into a point that how to develop an agile IS product in which there are simple and effective mechanisms to survive in chaotic environment and agilities that can be weakened by changes neither from interior or from exterior. So the IS is a complex adaptive system (CAS), which is an essential hypothesis in the paper. There are analyses of complexity of IS and comparisons of the features of CAS with those of IS, which proves the essential hypothesis is rational.There are great differences between enterprise information architecture and software architecture of IS, concluded by discussions of development rules of IS and requirement analysis of EIS, which defines the scope of this paper. With the two hints of this paper - software architecture and software development process -, based upon the essential hypothesis, the paper discuss the methods of solving the problems described in the paper.The paper gives the comparisons with these definitions of software architecture, regards it as a set of decisions about software system organization, emphasizes the important position of the software architecture from functions of software architecture and attributes of software quality. And the relations among software reuse, architecture patterns and software framework are discussed in details. As another hint, the adaptive software process guarantees the agility of information, which isintercrossed by architecture refactoring. The U-W-A hierarchical model of software process, analyses of task process model and entity process model, and of contents and contexts of cooperation, are discussed, which proves the complexity of software process and necessities of adaptive and cooperative software process. In the last, some constructive suggestions of building cooperative platform are given.In the conclusion, the deficiencies of the paper are summarized, and the future research topics are prospected.