Component based method for enterprise application design

Component support has actually been enhanced with version 2.0 of the Unified Modeling Language and component appears as the best reusable unit of software, whereas more and more pre-built components are made available. However, reuse of components to build system remains a difficult task. Components are mostly identified in the late phases of the system development cycle without considering the endusers’ requirements specified in the early phases. The effort required to develop or re-use components which satisfy the requirements is still significant, so that a lot of developers generally prefer to develop a system from scratch, while being largely influenced by technological concerns. This article presents a Model-Driven Engineering method based on the early identification of business components. Setting up the component identification during use case modeling, transforming requirements into logical components, enriches analysis using UML diagrams. Business archetype concept and component paradigm are jointly used to structure the componentbased process. This innovative method demonstrates that 1) components must be identified right from the use case model at the requirement stage of the development cycle and 2) a mechanism must be set up to ensure their traceability along the next stages. Building Platform Independent Models from the use case model, using a set of four Business Archetypes, maintains the consistency between components and requirements, ensures their traceability and facilitates their transformation into Platform-Specific Models, and then into code. In the whole, the proposed method should bring another significant progress to ModelDriven Engineering.