Beyond rigidity – dynamic process lifecycle support

A Lightweight BPMN Extension for Business Process-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effective adaptation of existing processes in order to easily introduce new or updated requirements. Such approaches are based on the adoption of widely used notations, such as the one introduced by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, BPMN models do not convey enough information on the involved entities and how they interact with process activities, thus leading to ambiguities, as well as to incomplete and inconsistent requirements definitions. This paper proposes an approach that allows stakeholders and software analysts to easily merge and integrate behavioral and data properties in a BPMN model, so as to fully exploit the potential of BPMN without incurring into the aforementioned limitation. The proposed approach introduces a lightweight BPMN extension that specifically addresses the annotation of data properties in terms of constraints, i.e., pre- and post-conditions that the different process activities must satisfy. The visual representation of the annotated model conveys all the information required both by stakeholders, to understand and validate requirements, and by software analysts and developers, to easily map these updates to the corresponding software implementation. The presented approach is illustrated by use of two running examples, which have also been used to carry out a preliminary validation activity.

A Novel Tool for Configurable Process Evolution and Service Derivation

In recent years, variability management in business processes is considered a key of reuse. Research works in this field focused mainly on variability modeling and resolution; whereas, evolution has been somehow neglected. In fact, new business requirements may occur, and business processes must evolve in order to meet the new needs. Furthermore, the evolution at business layer represented by configurable processes impact the IT layer represented by services. In this case, it is necessary to synchronize the changes between these two layers. In other words, the alignment of configurable processes and configurable services must occur to maintain an integrated view of an organization. This can be reached by the concept of service-based configurable processes. The study of existing tools in this domain shows the lack of solutions integrating both the evolution management, and the change propagation with respect to the variability. This article aims to represent the CPMEv, a novel tool for evolution management of service-based configurable processes.

Process Flexibility in Service Orchestration: A Systematic Literature Review

In dynamic environments, changes are often unpredictable and complex. Process models cannot be fully specified up-front and process flexibility becomes a key issue. Enterprise applications and systems supporting such processes are increasingly being architected in a service-oriented style. In this light, our goal is to analyze service orchestration approaches from a process flexibility perspective. Through a systematic literature review, we evaluate 17 service orchestration approaches and analyze their support for: (i) variability, support for large collections of process variants, (ii) adaptation, need for instance changes during runtime, (iii) evolution, need for schema changes during runtime, and (iv) looseness, need for loosely-specified models. The review findings provide a clearer understanding of process flexibility requirements and service orchestration mechanisms that support them, helping us to understand the limitations and shed light on future research areas.