Meta to the Rescue—Augmented Metamodels for Better Deployment of Pre-Packaged Applications
- 1 Department of Computer Science/The Technion, Haifa, Israel
- 2 IBM Research, Haifa, Israel
- 3 IBM Research, Haifa, Israel
Abstract
Recent estimates indicate that more than half the software market belongs to enterprise applications. One of the greatest challenges in these is in conducting the complex process of adaptation of pre-packaged applications, such as Oracle or SAP, to the organization needs. Although very detailed, structured and well documented methods govern this process, the consulting team implementing the method must spend much manual effort in making sure that the guidelines of the method are followed as intended by the method author. The problem is exacerbated by the diversity of skills and roles of team members, and the many sorts of communications of collaboration that methods prescribe. By enhancing the metamodel in which the methods are defined, we automatically produce a CASE tool (so to speak) for the applications of these methods. Our results are successfully employed in a number of large, ongoing projects with demonstrable, non-meager saving.
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