Thinging for Software Engineers

The aim of this paper is to promote the terms thing and thinging (which refers to the act of defining a boundary around some portion of reality and labeling it with a name) as valued notions that play an important role in software engineering modeling. Additionally, we attempt to furnish operational definitions for terms thing, object, process, and thinging. The substantive discussion is based on the conception of an (abstract) machine, named the Thinging Machine (TM), used in several research works. The TM creates, processes, receives, releases, and transfers things. Accordingly, a diagrammatic representation of the TM is used to model reality. In the discussion section, this paper clarifies interesting issues related to conceptual modeling in software engineering. The substance of this paper and its conclusion suggest that thinging should be more meaningfully emphasized as a valuable research and teaching topic, at least in the requirement analysis phase of the software development cycle.