Towards an Integration of Business Process Modeling and Object-Oriented Software Development

The successful development and implementation of business information systems requires an integrated approach which includes the seamless design of both the business processes and the information systems supporting the business processes. Therefore, several frameworks and modeling methods have been developed for an integrated modeling of the entire enterprise with respect to both organizational and information systems aspects. Due to the architecture of most existing business information systems, these approaches were usually based on traditional software development paradigms rather than on object-orientation. On the other hand, object-oriented modeling methods used to cover only aspects which are close to implementation, but not the business processes. Currently, however, these two worlds are mov-ing closer together because there are several benefits using business process models during object-oriented software development. This paper describes an approach for integrating business process and object-oriented modeling methods. With this approach, it is possible to model the relevant aspects of a company\u92s business processes and its object-oriented information systems without the need for switching between different modeling paradigms or for trans-lating between different modeling languages