Documenting electronic commerce systems and software using the unified modeling language

Electronic commerce (EC) systems are complex systems consisting of cooperating heterogeneous software, hardware and database subsystems that are distributed among processing nodes [1]. They are reactive, real-time and concurrent distributed systems. They are financially critical systems since they perform distributed business functions, the success of which is very critical for the business operation. The use of well-defined specification and documentation techniques is very essential for the effective development and maintenance of these systems. In this paper, we propose the use of the unified modeling language (UML) [2] as a technique for documenting and specifying EC systems at various levels of abstractions and from different views. We believe that the use of UML ensures a better reliability and reusability of these systems. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.