Re-engineering Software Development Process for eBusiness Application Development

We now need to develop a new class of software applications; eApplications, to support business processes for eBusiness organisations. The attempts to develop these applications using traditional software development methodologies have met with limited success. In order to better understand the requirements for these applications we studied how a business can transform into an eBusinesses. We call this process eTransformation. Our focus was on Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs). We discovered that this is an iterative process that can take several years. Based on our studies we also developed an eTransformation Roadmap and an eTransformation methodology to support the eTransformation of SMEs. We also realised that the eApplications need to evolve with time as part of this iterative process. As these applications evolve with time, traditional software development approaches that require the system to be fully specified as the first step of the development process are not suitable for the development of eApplications. We looked at various software development methodologies and adopted the concept that software is a medium to capture knowledge rather than a product. This led us to change our thinking from looking at methodologies to develop eApplications to developing a framework within which eApplications can evolve. We developed a Component Based E-Application Deployment Shell (CBEADS) as our framework. CBEADS has the ability to create new functions within its own framework so that it can evolve. These functions can be grouped together to form eApplications. We have deployed CBEADS into several organisations and we are receiving very positive feedback. 1. The Need for a New Software Development Approach We now have very efficient ways of capturing, storing, accessing and sharing information using electronic means compared to paper based systems. This, among other things is impacting the way we conduct business operations. Organisations can use Information and Communication Technologies to quickly and easily access information required for enhancing their strategic level decision-making, management level planning and control of operational level activities. Organisations can also use these technologies to enhance communication with clients, suppliers and employees. To distinguish paper-based way of conducting business process from enhanced ways of conducting business processes using electronic means we call the new approach eBusiness. eBusiness organisations rely very heavily on software applications to manage the flow of information within the organisation as well as with the outside world to gain a competitive advantage. We call these software applications eBusiness applications or eApplications to distinguish these from other types of software applications. The World Wide Web continues to be a major framework to develop the necessary eBusiness Applications because of the ease of deployment of Web based applications. A recent survey on Web based application development by the Cutter Consortium [1] highlighted the problems plaguing large eBusiness application development projects: • 84% of the time delivered systems didn’t meet business needs. • 53% of the time delivered systems didn’t have the required functionality • 79% of the time schedule delays plagued the projects. • 63% of the time projects exceeded the budget. At the University of Western Sydney we have been working with Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the Western Sydney Region of Australia for some years assisting them to transform their businesses to eBusinesses. With more than 72,000 businesses and ten percent of the Australian population living in this region, Western Sydney is considered the fastest growing economic region in Australia. Within this context we have been investigating ways of overcoming the above problems of developing Web based eApplications by improving the eBusiness application development process. A major challenge that we faced was the difficulty to fully specify the requirements for an eBusiness application at the start of a development project when working with SMEs. Often they had a vague idea of what they wanted. As the project progressed they saw new possibilities as to how their business processes could be further improved which led them to request new requirements. Also the introduction of eBusiness applications such as a Web site to promote marketing of products and services of an organisation created a need for some new business process to handle inquires coming through the Web, which led to the need for developing further software applications. Most traditional software development approaches such as Water Fall method [2], Spiral Model [3, 4], Rapid Prototyping etc. rely on being able to fully specify the system after initial requirement analysis. In our context we realised that this is not possible. We had to design eBusiness applications that can evolve with changing needs. Thus we identified the conventional approaches to developing software applications cannot be used when developing eBusiness applications. We had to reengineer the whole development process [5]. We found that lack of proven design and development methodologies was also contributing to problems relating to successful development of eBusiness applications [6]. We started our journey to find a way of developing eBusiness applications for SMEs by first studying how SMEs can undertake an eTransformation process. This gave us a good understanding of how business processes of an organisation will evolve with time. This knowledge helped us to develop a software development process that can be used to develop eApplications that can evolve with the evolving business processes in an organisation. Also when developing a software development process we had to take into account some aspects that are specific to SMEs. Compared to the investment potentials of larger organisations one of the crucial limitations of SMEs is that they cannot invest a large sum of money up front to enhance their IT infrastructure. Furthermore, these SMEs are also unable to free a group of people from their day-today operations for a substantial length of time to enable them to be trained externally and then bring them back as change agents. 2. eTransformation Process We identified that the business processes of an organisation can be divided into internal and external processes based on whether the people who use these processes are entirely within the organisation or external to the organisation, such as customers and suppliers. We then developed a way of mapping the evolution of these processes as these gradually become IT enabled [7]. This mapping is shown in Figure 1. Effective Individual Effective Team Effective Enterprise Basic