Specification of Business Components

Component-based software development is a potential reuse paradigm for the future. While the required technologies for a component-style system development are widely available, for instance Sun’s Enterprise Java Beans, a problem inhibits the breakthrough of the component paradigm in business application domains: compared to traditional engineering disciplines there is a lack of standardized methods to describe business components. Such a description has to address several aspects: What services are offered and requested by a business component? How can these services be used? Are there any interdependencies between the services of a set of business components? What quality characteristics do the offered services fulfill? And so on. In this paper, we present a holistic approach to specify a business component. This approach consists of seven specification levels which address both technical and business aspects. Furthermore, we show the application of this method by specifying a simple business component that deals with German bank codes.