Business Family Engineering - Managing the Evolution of Business Driven Systems

Nowadays most companies in whichever field have a software system that helps managing all the aspects of the company, from the strategic management to daily activities. Companies are in continuous evolution to adapt to market changes, and consequently, the Information Technology (IT) infrastructure that supports it must also evolve. Thus, software companies are currently supporting this evolution with ad hoc techniques. We think that, as it is being done for traditional software systems (non-oriented to business process) in the software product line (SPL) field, institutionalized techniques for performing a systematic reuse of business processes across different businesses can be introduced. In this paper, we propose to adapt SPL techniques, oriented to reuse software, to Business-Driven Development (BDD), oriented to reuse processes, across different businesses; we call this proposal Business Family Engineering (BFE). We present a first approach to build a SPL of BDD systems that evolves at runtime.