A Framework for Modeling, Building and Maintaining Enterprise Information Systems Software

An Enterprise Information System (EIS) software has three main aspects: data, which are processed to generate business information; application functions, which transform data into information; and business rules, which control and restrict the manipulation of data by functions. Traditional approaches to EIS software development consider data and application functions. Rules are second class citizens, embedded on the specification of either data (as database integrity constraints) or on the EIS functions (as a part of the application software). This work presents a new, integrated approach for the development and maintenance of EIS software. The main ideas are to focus on the conceptual modeling of the three aspects of the EIS software - application functions, business rules, and database schema - and to automatically generate code for each of these software aspects. This improves software quality, reducing redundancies by centralizing EIS definitions on a single conceptual model. Due to automatic generation of code, this approach increases the software engineering staff productivity, making it possible to respond to the continuous changes in the business domain.