So in terms of
software engineering, the speci?¬?cations would need to be maintained over time.
To implement the portal, the ?¬?rst option considered was to ask programmers to write
the product speci?¬?cations in Java. This step would most likely be supported by
insurance experts who would ?¬?rst codify relevant parts of the insurance products into
requirement documents. These would then be used by programmers to write the
implementation. This step was taken ?¬?rst and applied to implement a few product
speci?¬?cations. The second option, used in production, was creating a Domain-Speci?¬?c
Modeling (DSM) solution that would allow domain experts, that is, insurance people,
to specify the products completely and then generate the needed implementation. This
choice led to signi?¬?cantly faster development, allowed speci?¬?cations to be checked
early, leading to fewer errors, and reduced the amount of resources needed. Next we
describe the development process and the DSM solution in more detail.
6.2 DEVELOPMENT PROCESS
The creation of a DSM solution started because the company was seeking an ef?¬?cient
way to capture ?¬?nancial and insurance products and implement its portal-based
service. Manual programming was simply seen as too costly, time-consuming,
and leading to errors that would later cause problems when insurance information
would be analyzed and compared.
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