Second ECOOP Workshop on Precise Behavioral Semantics (with an Emphasis on OO Business Specifications)

Business specifications are essential to describe and understand businesses (and, in particular, business rules) independently of any computing systems used for their possible automation. They have to express this understanding in a clear, precise, and explicit way, in order to act as a common ground between business domain experts and software developers. They also provide the basis for reuse of concepts and constructs (“patterns”) common to all – from finance to telecommunications –, or a large number of, businesses, and in doing so save intellectual effort, time and money. Moreover, these patterns substantially ease the elicitation and validation of business specifications during walkthroughs with business customers, and support separation of concerns using viewpoints. Precise specifications of business semantics in business terms provide a common ground for subject matter experts, analysts and developers. All users of these specifications ought to be able to understand them. Therefore languages used to express such specifications should have precise semantics: as noted by Wittgenstein, “the silent adjustments to understand colloquial language are enormously complicated” [4]. (Not only English may be colloquial; graphical representations also may have this property1.) If business specifications do not exist, or if they are incomplete, vague or inconsistent, then the developers will (have to) invent business rules. This often leads to systems that do something quite different from what they were supposed to do. Business specifications are refined into business designs (“who does what when”), from where creation of various information system (software) specifications and implementations based on a choice of strategy and – precisely and explicitly specified! – environment, including technological architecture, are possible. In this con-