Tools for Business Process Modelling:
ICF-Expert of University Erlangen-Nürnberg
The main goal of requirements engineering is to systematically discover the software requirements that are essential for a particular company. This paper discusses an approach based on the dependencies between characteristics of an enterprise and its software requirements. Moreover the paper presents the module ICF-Expert as part of the ICF-System which uses a formal description of a company's characteristics to automatically generate recommendations for IS functionality.
To reach this purpose, the enterprise functions are structured in a functional reference model based on recursive decomposition but without a clear hierarchical relationships. Examples of the applications of enterprise software provide the base for statistical evaluations. Further, the module ICF-Expert (industry-characteristic-function) is presented, which is a component of the ICF system. ICF-Expert employs a formal description of the enterprise characteristics to make knowledge based proposals for the functionality of ICT systems . To describe enterprise models the ICF-Expert employs two different languages: an attribute language and a function language. The first one is used to describe the enterprise properties, whereas the latter one identifies the operational requirements
Published in 'Information Technologies and Knowledge Systems', Proceedings of the XV. IFIP World Computer Congress 1998, Cuena, Jose (Ed.): Vienna, Budapest, page 273-286.
Contact: Thomas Kaufmann, FORWISS (Research Group Information Systems
(Prof. Dr. P. Mertens)), University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Am Weichselgarten
7, D-91058 Erlangen / Germany , kaufmann@forwiss.de