A requirements-based approach for representing micro-business patterns

Patterns aid in the development of software for micro-businesses. However, capturing recurring concepts in good representations for the purpose of requirements engineering is challenging. Such representations need to be intuitive enough so that non-technical people such as micro-business owners can understand them. At the same time, the representations have to be technical enough so that software developers can use them for software design and development. In this paper, we propose a requirements-based approach for representing micro-business patterns. We describe pattern emergence from observation and analysis. We list down and specify both the functional and nonfunctional requirements of the micro-business in a table and then represent the workflows using diagrams. We use a combination of a business process modeling notation, softgoal interdependency graphs, and our own customized symbols. Four real-world micro-business cases are discussed in the paper in order to see both the strengths and weaknesses of our approach.