A coarse granular approach to software development allowing non-programmers to build and deploy reliable, web based applications

Abstract

Today's software development is mainly performed by IT experts. The application expert participates only in a light way in the software development process: traditionally, he is only involved within the requirements analysis and the acceptance test. He has no influence on the software development. The result of the loose integration of the application expert are long delivery times. This is due to the fact that IT experts are a rare resource and that misunderstandings lead to fallbacks within the software development cycle. This thesis presents a component-based software development process for Web-based applications and its concrete application within the ETI project which directly integrates the application expert into the software development on his level of understanding. Based on a set of building blocks modeling activities of the application domain, the application expert can specify the workflows the application has to implement. Afterwards, the actual application is automatically generated and packaged. During the design of the workflows the application expert is guided by formal methods which guarantee the consistency of the application at the workflow level.