An Integrated Quality Assurance Framework for Specifying Business Information Systems

The software specification acts as a bridge between customers, architects, software developers and testers. If information gets lost or distorted when building this bridge, the wrong system will be built or the system will not be built in time and budget⎯or both! Standards and recommendations give advice on how to structure specifications or check software-engineering artefacts with reviews or inspections. But these constructive and analytical approaches are not well integrated with each other. Moreover, they are often too generic to efficiently support the specification of particular system types. In this paper, we present the integrated “specification framework” of Capgemini sd&m. It consists of our specification method for business information systems (BIS) and its concerted analytical counterpart, the “specification quality gate”. Since this framework is tailored to the specification of large BIS, it allows a quick ramp-up phase for software engineering projects without the need for extensive tailoring or extension.