B2B Services: Worksheet-Driven Development of Modeling Artifacts and Code

In the development process of a B2B system, it is crucial that the business experts are able to express<br> and evaluate agreements and commitments between the partners, and that the software engineers<br> get all necessary information to bind the private process interfaces to the public ones. UN/CEFACT´s<br> modeling methodology (UMM) is a Unified Modeling Language (UML) profile for developing B2B<br> processes. The formalisms introduced by UMM´s stereotypes facilitate the communication with the<br> software engineers. However, business experts-who usually have a very limited understanding of<br> UML-prefer expressing their thoughts and evaluating the results by plain text descriptions. In this<br> paper,we describe an approach that presents an equivalent of theUMMstereotypes and tagged values<br> in text-based templates called worksheets. This strong alignment allows an integration into a UMM<br> modeling tool and ensures consistency. We show how a specially designed XML-based worksheet<br> definition language allows customization to special needs of certain business domains. Furthermore,<br> we demonstrate how information kept in worksheets may be used for the semi-automatic generation<br> of pattern-based UMM artifacts which are later transformed to web service definition language and<br> business process execution language code.