The purpose of the architecture of software systems in business organizations is to support those organizations in achieving business goals. In software development organizations the design of an architecture is a collective effort that involves various organizational stakeholders and designers,...

Within the information systems field, the task of conceptual modeling involves building a representation of selected phenomena in some domain. High-quality conceptual-modeling work is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. It also plays an...

Much research has been devoted over the years to investigating and advancing the techniques and tools used by analysts when they model. As opposed to what academics, software providers and their resellers promote as should be happening, the aim of this research was to determine whether...

This article proposes an abstract machine, known by the acronym FM, for modeling behavior currently described by finite state machines (SMs) in conjunction with related notions such as state and event. Although the SM concept was born more than 50 years ago and is widely applied in hardware...

If there is a constant in software development, then it is that its ecosystem is a variable. The agile methodologies are part of a relatively recent shift from predictive to adaptive approach towards software development. This change has had a notable impact on software engineering education...

The idea that ontological theories could be used to provide a theoretical basis for evaluating conceptual-modeling grammars and scripts was initiated some thirty years ago. The authors provide some brief history about the early research that discussed how ontological theories might be used to...

Conceptual modeling is currently considered a significant phase in information systems development. Several modeling grammars and methods have been studied extensively in the information systems discipline. However, previous research on conceptual models has focused on certain grammar (syntax)...

In this paper, we investigate the effect on understanding of using business domain models that are constructed using Resource-Event-Agent (REA) modeling patterns. First, we analyze REA modeling structures to identify the enabling factors and the mechanisms by means of which users recognize these...