A Family of Patterns for Business Resource Management

Abstract

ICMC-Universidade de S o PauloE-mail: masiero@icmc.sc.usp.brAbstractA family of patterns that covers a great number of applications in business systems is presented.Business Resource Management is the term used to d efine these applications. It includes patterns forResource Rental, Resource Trade and Resource Maintenance. They are applied to examples as medicalattendance, video rental, real estate rental, library service, show box office, fertilizer retail store, car repairshop and electronic appliance repair shop. The work is based on professional practice, and results from thecombination of recurring patterns, already covered in other PLoPs. The practice used mostly procedurallanguages, but through object oriented reverse engineering of real systems it was possible to explicit thepresented object oriented patterns.1 - IntroductionWe present a family of patterns for designing systems for business resource management. Mostbusiness have some assets that they use to make money. Sometimes they buy and sell them. Sometimes theyrent them out and sometimes these assets deteriorate and have to be repaired. This family results from morethan ten years of practice of systems development for medium and small business. Most of this practice hasbeen done using procedural languages, but after getting acquainted with the concept of software patterns itwas possible to recognize patterns as the basis of the reuse that has been done in the construction of more thantwenty systems. They cover electric and mechanical car repair shops, television and video cassette repairshops, fertilizer retail stores, motorcycle dealers, electronic appliance repair shops, perfume retail stores,video-rental stores, odontological attendance, publicity agencies, etc.In all these systems, some objects can be easily identified, as well as the methods they involve, theirrelationships and attributes. For example, customer or party is a common object, with its usual attributes likecode, name, address, etc. Another object that appears repeatedly is resource, with transactions to relate it tothe parties. If we try to use recurring patterns to each of these situations, we can observe that many patternsare similarly applied.The family of patterns here presented, called Business Resource Management, includes three patternsthat are formed by recurring patterns originally proposed by Coad [Coad 92], Fowler [Fowler 97], Johnson[Johnson 98] and Boyd [Boyd 98]. Their combination for the applications mentioned above have commonpoints that are covered in the presented family of patterns. The similarities among these systems make itworth to think about how to establish a pattern that could come to the mind of designers when they aredeveloping a system in the domain.

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