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Modelling Multi-Facetted Purposes of Artefacts
Abstract
Whereas software variability deals with customisation and adaptability of software, we consider here the issue of modelling variability for Information System artefacts. We view variability in the larger perspective of the system meeting the purpose of many organisations and customer groups. We propose to represent this multi-facetted nature of a purpose through the notion of intentions and strategies organised as a map. The map is a directed, labelled, non-deterministic graph with intentions as nodes, and strategies to achieve intentions, as edges. Its nature allows the capture of different forms of variability through multiedges between a pair of nodes thereby enabling many traversals of the graph from beginning to end. Besides, using the refinement mechanism of the map, it is possible to represent variability at different levels of detail. We show the power of a map to represent variability and, as an illustration, model the variations of the SAP Materials module as a map.
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