Enterprise business application product line as a model driven software factory

Enterprise business applications are critical to the smooth operation of modern businesses. They need to perform and scale up to the ever-increasing demands of modern businesses on IT, and are implemented using distributed architectures. These applications tend to have a long life during which they need to quickly respond to changing business rules, business processes and technology platforms. No two businesses are exactly alike even in the same business domain. This calls for an enterprise business application to be specialized for the needs of a specific business. Product line architectures that organize systems into well-defined core and variable parts have been proposed to address this need. Traditional code based development approaches do not provide the right kind of abstractions to support product lines. We propose a model driven development approach that enables a system to be specified in terms of composable units along the required dimensions of variations of a product line. Such a platform-independent specification can be retargeted to technology platforms of choice using model-based code generators. We propose a software factory for an enterprise business application product line wherein a set of purpose-specific tools generated from their specifications support a purposespecific development process. We describe our experience in building and using such a software factory.