Framework and meta-model for specifying business components

Purpose - Component-based software development is a potential reuse paradigm for the future. While the required technologies for a component-style system development are widely available (e.g. Sun's Enterprise Java Beans), the breakthrough of the component paradigm in business application domains is impeded by the following problem: compared with traditional engineering disciplines there is a lack of standardized methods to describe business components. The objective of this paper is to develop a holistic approach to specify business components. Design/methodology/approach - In this paper, a design science approach is used. Based on well-known specification notations, a new specification framework is proposed. The usefulness of the framework is demonstrated by an example. Findings - It is argued that a specification framework for business components has to address several aspects: what services are offered and requested by a business component? How can these services be used? Are there any interdependencies between the services of a set of business components? What quality characteristics do the offered services fulfil? And so on. The proposed approach consists of seven specification levels addressing both technical and business aspects. Originality/value - According to the authors' knowledge the developed specification framework is the first one which allows a holistic description of business components. The proposed approach can be used to precisely specify business components in practice. The main contribution is to tie together various well-known and preferably standardized specification notations. Furthermore, the authors develop a meta-model for the proposed specification framework that facilitates the communication about the framework, supports training on the framework, and simplifies the implementation of the framework. To conclude, this work is meant to implement theory in practice.