The Collaborative Process;How Do We Deploy User Requirements to the Design of Component Models?

Since their first inception a few decades ago, software components have received much attention mainly due to their alleged benefits of quality and productivity improvement. Despite this, it is yet to be agreed upon what and how components should be designed. This paper aimed to bridge the gap by proposing a collaborative process where the voice of the customer is captured and documented by employing the event and entity models. These requirement elements (WHAT) are cross-tabulated in three relation matrices in accordance with the weights provided by the business users. The requirements are fed into the algorithm invented by the authors to optimize the component grouping (HOW). This collaborative process has been successfully validated at an enterprise wide software development project. The process was effective to help the users more actively involved in the design of the system and made the whole process faster and more adaptive to the changes.