Mining architectural patterns in specific contexts and its application to e-finance

The success of today's enterprises is critically dependant on their ability to automate the way they conduct business with customers and other enterprises by means of e-business applications. However, developers are confronted with a large number of alternatives when considering the design and implementation of e-business applications such as deciding on whether or how legacy system integration should be performed. Identifying the set of possible architectural design alternatives for a given problem context is not trivial since it requires architects to have extensive experience in a specific domain and its existing information systems. Moreover, determining the alternatives that corresponds to good architectural practices and selecting the most appropriate one for a given e-business application would have critical impact on participating enterprises. This chapter discusses a two-phase systematic framework for the determination of a range of alternative architectural designs for e-business applications and for making these alternatives evolve into either formal architectural patterns or anti-patterns. Such a framework is investigated based on a specific problem context in the e-finance domain with some requirements and assumptions that are based on experience working in that domain. The concepts presented in this paper are demonstrated using a real life context specification example derived from capital markets trading.