Activity Diagram Based Process Family Architectures for Enterprise Application Families

Today, enterprise software vendors typically sell their enterprise applications in many different variants, which allows for a better market penetration regarding diverging customer needs and financial power of the customers. Since one enterprise application can be composed of several subsystems coming from different software providers interoperability issues between the different subsystems have to be taken into account during the design and implementation of the enterprise application and its variants. One effective technique for the development of families of similar software system variants is known as product family engineering. Product family engineering concentrates on a concrete family of software variants tackling any interoperability issues explicitly for the set of family members intended to be part of the product family. Advantages of applying product family engineering techniques are reduced development costs, a quicker time to market for the system variants, and typically a higher software quality [1]. Therefore, the application of product family engineering techniques can help improving the