Deliver business conduct

The principle "Deliver business conduct" invites project teams to deliver not just software, but software embedded in the desired way in day-to-day business operations.

Business software is not a stand-alone product. It operates in an organisational context. Rather than just building, testing and deploying the next piece or version of software, a project team can (as part of the same effort) deliver a complete view of how the business supported by the software should operate.

This is achieved by creating specifications that formulate intended business conduct, and creating corresponding implementations in parallel. Specifications go beyond detailing the functionality of new software. They address:

•The various actions or transactions that are supported by the software.

•People, departments, partners and other parties involved in these actions.

•The structure of objects, processes, data and events that the business has to deal with.

Not all the specifications will be directly implemented in software. However, they allow a wider view, in which new software is not only introduced but also aligned to intended business conduct. In the USoft Approach, specifications are more than software specifications: they describe the target situation in a broader sense.

The USoft platform is model-driven, but not in the sense that it focuses on models of software constructs. USoft is not primarily concerned with data models, SOA architecture models or process flow models.

The "Deliver business conduct" principle hails from long-standing business ontology initiatives such as NIAM, ORM and the DEMO Enterprise Ontology project. UML is usually more closely associated with object-oriented coding, but if applied to business modelling, it is a similar initiative.

For specifications, the USoft Approach favours the expression of business vocabulary and business rules in natural language, according to OMG's Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules (SBVR).

For software implementations, the USoft Approach favours the implementation of automated behavior in terms of structure and rules, to the extent that rules are a suitable concept for understanding the business logic. This behavior based on structure and rules is then deployed in interfaces - graphical user interfaces, but also services - that act in a business context of processes, events, message handling and data exchange.