A MEASUR and RUP Combined Business Modeling Method

Abstract

Business modeling is a primary task in the information systems development lifecycle. Although both MEASUR (Methods for Eliciting, Analyzing and Specifying User’s Requirement) and RUP (Rational Unified Process) provide their own Business Modeling Method (BMM), each has obvious merits and demerits. To keep the merits and avoid the demerits at the same time, in this paper, a MEASUR and RUP combined BMM is devised based on the comparison of the two BMMs respectively from the semantics, pragmatics and social world of the semiotic framework. The method proposed consists of three activities in sequence. Unified Modeling Language (UML) Use Case Diagrams (UCD) are employed in the first activity “UML UCD Modeling” to model business functions concerning with the social world since they are the only formal result modeling business functions in both BMMs. The extended UML Activity Diagrams (AD) are employed in the second activity “Extended UML AD Modeling” to model both norms and communications concerning with both the social world and the pragmatics since UML AD can model communications directly and obviously but norms cannot and therefore make the analysis of purposes in communications much easier. In addition, it is easy to extend UML AD with the deontic operators to express the same meaning as norms following the simple rules. The Ontology Charts (OC) are employed in the third activity “OC Modeling” to define meanings of terminology used in business models and concerning with the semantics since ontological dependencies are modeled directly and clearly in OC but not defined in UML Class Diagrams.