A visual language and environment for enterprise system modelling and automation

ObjectiveWe want to support enterprise service modelling and generation using a more end user-friendly metaphor than current approaches, which fail to scale to large organisations with key issues of “cobweb” and “labyrinth” problems and large numbers of hidden dependencies.MethodWe present and evaluate an integrated visual approach for business process modelling using a novel tree-based overlay structure that effectively mitigate complexity problems. A tree-overlay based visual notation (EML) and its integrated support environment (MaramaEML) supplement and integrate with existing solutions. Complex business architectures are represented as service trees and business processes are modelled as process overlay sequences on the service trees.ResultsMaramaEML integrates EML and BPMN to provide complementary, high-level business service modelling and supports automatic BPEL code generation from the graphical representations to realise web services implementing the specified processes. It facilitates generated service validation using an integrated LTSA checker and provides a distortion-based fisheye and zooming function to enhance complex diagram navigation. Evaluations of EML show its effectiveness.ConclusionsWe have successfully developed and evaluated a novel tree-based metaphor for business process modelling and enterprise service generation. Practice implications: a more user-friendly modelling approach and support tool for business end users.     

Using intentional fragments to bridge the gap between organizational and intentional levels

ContextBusiness process models provide a natural way to describe real-world processes to be supported by software-intensive systems. These models can be used to analyze processes in the system-as-is and describe potential improvements for the system-to-be. But, how well does a given business process model satisfy its business goals? How can different perspectives be integrated in order to describe an inter-organizational process?ObjectiveThe aim of the present paper is to link the local and the global perspectives of the inter-organizational business process defined in BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation) to KAOS goal models (Keep All Objectives Satisfied). We maintain a separation of concerns between the intentional level captured by the goal model and the organizational level captured by the process model. The paper presents the concept of intentional fragment (a set of flow elements of the process with a common purpose) and assess its usefulness.MethodWe conducted empirical experiments where the proposed concepts – here the intentional fragments – are validated by users. Our method relies on an iterative improvement process led by users feedback.ResultsWe find that the concept of intentional fragment is useful for (1) analyzing the business process model (2) reasoning about the relations between the goal model and the business process model and (3) identifying new goals. In a previous work we focused on BPMN 2.0 collaboration models (local view). This paper extends the previous work by integrating the global view given by choreography models in the approach.ConclusionWe conclude that the notion of intentional fragment is a useful mean to relate business process models and goal models while dealing with their different nature (activity oriented vs goal oriented). Intentional fragments can also be used to analyze the process model and to infer new goals in an iterative manner.     

Agile enterprise architecture modelling: Evaluating the applicability and integration of six modelling standards

ContextAgile enterprise architecture artefacts are initially architected at the high-level and the details of those artefacts iteratively evolve in small project increments. There is a need to model agile enterprise architecture artefacts both at the high and low detailed level for a particular context. ArchiMate is relatively a new high-level architecture modelling standard. There is a growing interest amongst organisations in applying ArchiMate for high-level agile enterprise architecture modelling. However, organisations are unsure how to effectively apply ArchiMate at high-level and integrate it with their existing low detailed level modelling standards in practice for supporting end-to-end agile enterprise architecture modelling.ObjectiveThis paper evaluates the applicability and integration of high-level ArchiMate modelling standard with the existing low-level modelling standards such as BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation), UML (Unified Modelling Language), FAML (FAME [Framework for Agent-Oriented Method Engineering] Language), SoaML (Service Oriented Architecture Modelling Language), and BMM (Business Motivation Model).MethodA qualitative questionnaire-based evaluation criteria has been developed based on the well-known and comprehensive The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF). The evaluation criteria has been applied to evaluate the applicability and integration of the selected six modelling standards from the business, application, infrastructure and extension perspectives.ResultsEach modelling standard is different in scope. A single modelling standard usually does not provide the kind of support required by the agile enterprise architecture modelling. Based on the review results, a hybrid enterprise architecture modelling approach is proposed. This paper demonstrates the application of the proposed hybrid approach with the help of an agile enterprise architecture modelling case study.ConclusionIt is concluded that the ArchiMate does not replace the existing low-level modelling standards, rather it can be used in conjunction with low-level modelling standards. This calls for the adoption of hybrid and integrated approach for agile enterprise architecture modelling.     

A complete approach for CIM modelling and model formalising

ContextComputation Independent Model (CIM) as a business model describes the requirements and environment of a business system and instructs the designing and development; it is a key to influencing software success. Although many studies currently focus on model driven development (MDD); those researches, to a large extent, study the PIM-level and PSM-level model, and few have dealt with CIM-level modelling for case in which the requirements are unclear or incomplete.ObjectiveThis paper proposes a CIM-level modelling approach, which applies a stepwise refinement approach to modelling the CIM-level model starting from a high-level goal model to a lower-level business process model. A key advantage of our approach is the combination of the requirement model with the business model, which helps software engineers to define business models exactly for cases in which the requirements are unclear or incomplete.MethodThis paper, based on the model driven approach, proposes a set of models at the CIM-level and model transformations to connect these models. Accordingly, the formalisation approach of this paper involves formalising the goal model using the category theory and the scenario model and business process model using Petri nets.ResultsWe have defined a set of metamodels and transformation rules making it possible to obtain automatically a scenario model from the goal model and a business process model from the scenario model. At the same time, we have defined a mapping rule to formalise these models. Our proposed CIM modelling approach and formalisation approach are implemented with an MDA tool, and it has been empirically validated by a travel agency case study.ConclusionThis study shows how a CIM modelling approach helps to build a complete and consistent model at the CIM level for cases in which the requirements are unclear or incomplete in advance.     

Model-Driven Engineering as a new landscape for traceability management: A systematic literature review

ContextModel-Driven Engineering provides a new landscape for dealing with traceability in software development.ObjectiveOur goal is to analyze the current state of the art in traceability management in the context of Model-Driven Engineering.MethodWe use the systematic literature review based on the guidelines proposed by Kitchenham. We propose five research questions and six quality assessments.ResultsOf the 157 relevant studies identified, 29 have been considered primary studies. These studies have resulted in 17 proposals.ConclusionThe evaluation shows that the most addressed operations are storage, CRUD and visualization, while the most immature operations are exchange and analysis traceability information.     

VIVACE: A framework for the systematic evaluation of variability support in process-aware information systems

ContextThe increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAISs) such as workflow management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, or case management systems, together with the high variability in business processes (e.g., sales processes may vary depending on the respective products and countries), has resulted in large industrial process model repositories. To cope with this business process variability, the proper management of process variants along the entire process lifecycle becomes crucial.ObjectiveThe goal of this paper is to develop a fundamental understanding of business process variability. In particular, the paper will provide a framework for assessing and comparing process variability approaches and the support they provide for the different phases of the business process lifecycle (i.e., process analysis and design, configuration, enactment, diagnosis, and evolution).MethodWe conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) in order to discover how process variability is supported by existing approaches.ResultsThe SLR resulted in 63 primary studies which were deeply analyzed. Based on this analysis, we derived the VIVACE framework. VIVACE allows assessing the expressiveness of a process modeling language regarding the explicit specification of process variability. Furthermore, the support provided by a process-aware information system to properly deal with process model variants can be assessed with VIVACE as well.ConclusionsVIVACE provides an empirically-grounded framework for process engineers that enables them to evaluate existing process variability approaches as well as to select that variability approach meeting their requirements best. Finally, it helps process engineers in implementing PAISs supporting process variability along the entire process lifecycle.     

BPMNt: A BPMN extension for specifying software process tailoring

ContextAlthough SPEM 2.0 has great potential for software process modeling, it does not provide concepts or formalisms for precise modeling of process behavior. Indeed, SPEM fails to address process simulation, execution, monitoring and analysis, which are important activities in process management. On the other hand, BPMN 2.0 is a widely used notation to model business processes that has associated tools and techniques to facilitate the aforementioned process management activities. Using BPMN to model software development processes can leverage BPMN’s infrastructure to improve the quality of these processes. However, BPMN lacks an important feature to model software processes: a mechanism to represent process tailoring.ObjectiveThis paper proposes BPMNt, a conservative extension to BPMN that aims at creating a tailoring representation mechanism similar to the one found in SPEM 2.0.MethodWe have used the BPMN 2.0 extensibility mechanism to include the representation of specific tailoring relationships namely suppression, local contribution, and local replacement, which establish links between process elements (such as in the case of SPEM). Moreover, this paper also presents some rules to ensure the consistency of BPMN models when using tailoring relationships.ResultsIn order to evaluate our proposal we have implemented a tool to support the BPMNt approach and have applied it for representing real process adaptations in the context of an academic management system development project. Results of this study showed that the approach and its support tool can successfully be used to adapt BPMN-based software processes in real scenarios.ConclusionWe have proposed an approach to enable reuse and adaptation of BPMN-based software process models as well as derivation traceability between models through tailoring relationships. We believe that bringing such capabilities into BPMN will open new perspectives to software process management.     

Modelling non-functional requirements of business processes

This paper presents an approach to the identification and inclusion of ‘non-functional’ aspects of a business process in modelling for business improvement. The notion of non-functional requirements (NFRs) is borrowed from software engineering, and a method developed in that field for linking NFRs to conceptual models is adapted and applied to business process modelling. Translated into this domain, NFRs are equated with the general or overall quality attributes of a business process, which, though essential aspects of any effective process, are not well captured in a functionally oriented process model. Using an example of a healthcare process (cancer registration in Jordan). We show how an analysis and evaluation of NFRs can be applied to a process model developed with role activity diagramming (RAD) to operationalise desirable quality features more explicitly in the model. This gives a useful extension to RAD and similar modelling methods, as well as providing a basis for business improvement.     

Enhancing software artefact traceability recovery processes with link count information

ContextThe intensive human effort needed to manually manage traceability information has increased the interest in using semi-automated traceability recovery techniques. In particular, Information Retrieval (IR) techniques have been largely employed in the last ten years to partially automate the traceability recovery process.AimPrevious studies mainly focused on the analysis of the performances of IR-based traceability recovery methods and several enhancing strategies have been proposed to improve their accuracy. Very few papers investigate how developers (i) use IR-based traceability recovery tools and (ii) analyse the list of suggested links to validate correct links or discard false positives. We focus on this issue and suggest exploiting link count information in IR-based traceability recovery tools to improve the performances of the developers during a traceability recovery process.MethodTwo empirical studies have been conducted to evaluate the usefulness of link count information. The two studies involved 135 University students that had to perform (with and without link count information) traceability recovery tasks on two software project repositories. Then, we evaluated the quality of the recovered traceability links in terms of links correctly and erroneously traced by the students.ResultsThe results achieved indicate that the use of link count information significantly increases the number of correct links identified by the participants.ConclusionsThe results can be used to derive guidelines on how to effectively use traceability recovery approaches and tools proposed in the literature.     

Reasoning with contextual requirements: Detecting inconsistency and conflicts

ContextThe environment in which the system operates, its context, is variable. The autonomous ability of a software to adapt to context has to be planned since the requirements analysis stage as a strong mutual influence between requirements and context does exist. On the one hand, context is a main factor to decide whether to activate a requirement, the applicable alternatives to meet an activated requirement as well as their qualities. On the other hand, the system actions to reach requirements could cause changes in the context.ObjectivesModelling the relationship between requirements and context is a complex task and developing error-free models is hard to achieve without an automated support. The main objective of this paper is to develop a set of automated analysis mechanisms to support the requirements engineers to detect and analyze modelling errors in contextual requirements models.MethodWe study the analysis of the contextual goal model which is a requirements model that weaves together the variability of both context and requirements. Goal models are used during the early stages of software development and, thus, our analysis detects errors early in the development process. We develop two analysis mechanisms to detect two kinds of modelling errors. The first mechanism concerns the detection of inconsistent specification of contexts in a goal model. The second concerns the detection of conflicting context changes that arise as a consequence of the actions performed by the system to meet different requirements simultaneously. We support our analysis with a CASE tool and provide a systematic process that guides the construction and analysis of contextual goal models. We illustrate and evaluate our framework via a case study on a smart-home system for supporting the life of people having dementia problems.ResultsThe evaluation showed a significant ability of our analysis mechanisms to detect errors which were not notable by requirements engineers. Moreover, the evaluation showed acceptable performance of these mechanisms when processing up to medium-sized contextual goal models. The modelling constructs which we proposed as an input to enable the analysis were found easy to understand and capture.ConclusionsOur developed analysis for the detection of inconsistency and conflicts in contextual goal models is an essential step for the entire system correctness. It avoids us developing unusable and unwanted functionalities and functionalities which lead to conflicts when they operate together. Further research to improve our analysis to scale with large-sized models and to consider other kinds of errors is still needed.     

New perspectives in ontological analysis: Guidelines and rules for incorporating modelling languages into UEML

Ontological analysis of modelling languages has been mainly used for evaluating quality of modelling language w.r.t. one specific upper ontology. Generally speaking this evaluation has been done by identifying the coverage of the modelling language constructs w.r.t. the ontology and vice-versa. However, a quite limited support has been developed for performing the ontological analysis task. Specifically, various ontologies used for ontological analysis are not associated to a machine readable format; the coverage of modelling language constructs is mostly provided by informal tables mapping one construct on to one ontological concept; the way in which this coverage task is undertaken is poorly specified (resulting in distinct results for distinct experts involved), and finally, preventing any ontology enrichment for dealing with some specialised language constructs. This limited support also prevents application of ontological analysis outcomes to problems and domains dealing with interoperability, integration and integrated usage of enterprise and IS models, which is today one of the key aspects for making interoperable, maintainable and evolvable inter and intra enterprise software systems. The paper provides an overview of the Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) approach, which introduces advanced support to ontological analysis of modelling languages. The paper is specifically focused on the task of ontological analysis of modelling languages (named incorporation of modelling languages) by introducing and explaining several guidelines and rules for driving the task: therefore, not all the aspects of the UEML approach will be discussed through the paper. The guidelines and rules are illustrated by incorporation of three selected modelling constructs from IDEF3, a well known language for specifying enterprise processes.     

An integrated approach based on execution measures for the continuous improvement of business processes realized by services

ContextOrganizations are rapidly adopting Business Process Management (BPM) as they focus on their business processes (BPs), seeing them to be key elements in controlling and improving the way they perform their business. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) takes as its focus the collection and analysis of information from the execution of BPs for the support of decision making, based on the discovery of improvement opportunities. Realizing BPs by services introduces an intermediate service layer that enables us to separate the specification of BPs in terms of models from the technologies implementing them, thus improving their modifiability by decoupling the model from its implementation.ObjectiveTo provide an approach for the continuous improvement of BPs, based on their realization with services and execution measurement. It comprises an improvement process to integrate the improvements into the BPs and services, an execution measurement model defining and categorizing several measures for BPs and service execution, and tool support for both.MethodWe carried out a systematic literature review, to collect existing proposals related to our research work. Then, in close collaboration with business experts from the Hospital General de Ciudad Real (HGCR), Spain, and following design science principles, we developed the methods and artifacts described in this paper, which were validated by means of a case study.ResultsWe defined an improvement process extending the BP lifecycle with measurement and improvement activities, integrating an execution measurement model comprising a set of execution measures. Moreover, we developed a plug-in for the ProM framework to visualize the measurement results as a proof-of-concept prototype. The case study with the HGCR has shown its feasibility.ConclusionsOur improvement vision, based on BPs realized by services and on measurement of their execution, in conjunction with a systematic approach to integrate the detected improvements, provides useful guidance to organizations.     

Modelling mobile app requirements for semantic traceability

The paper presents a modelling method aimed to support the definition and elicitation of requirements for mobile apps through an approach that enables semantic traceability for the requirements representation. Business process-centricity is employed in order to capture requirements in a knowledge structure that retains procedural knowledge from stakeholders and can be traversed by semantic queries in order to trace domain-specific contextual information for the modelled requirements. Consequently, instead of having requirements represented as natural language items that are documented by diagrammatic models, the communication channels are switched: semantically interlinked conceptual models become the requirements representation, while free text can be used for requirements annotations/metadata. Thus, the method establishes a knowledge externalization channel between business stakeholders and app developers, also tackling the Twin Peaks bridging challenge (between requirements and early designs). The method is presented using its modelling procedure as a guiding thread, with each step illustrated by case-based samples of the modelling language and auxiliary functionality. The design work is encompassed by an existing metamodelling framework and introduces a taxonomy for modelling relations, since the metamodel is the key enabler for the goal of semantic traceability. The research was driven by the ComVantage EU research project, concerned with mobile app support for collaborative business process execution. Therefore, the project provides context for the illustrating examples; however, generalization possibilities beyond the project scope will also be discussed, with respect to both motivation and outcome.     

CIMOSA modelling processes

Engineering, integrating and managing complex enterprises requires the understanding, and the ability to partition and simplify their operational complexity. Enterprise modelling supports these requirements by providing means for describing process oriented systems and decomposing those into manageable pieces. However, enterprise modelling requires both a common modelling language and a sufficient modelling methodology. The language provides for common understanding on enterprise models across the industrial community. Modelling methodologies will guide users through the rather complex enterprise modelling tasks. Depending on the skills and the tasks of the modelling person, different methodologies will be implemented in the supporting modelling tool. The paper presents both a methodology for the modelling expert and one for the business user. Whereas the modelling expert will be involved in creating new models, structuring the model contents and developing new modelling components, the business user will use process models for decision support. The latter therefore has a need to modify and adapt enterprise models to represent operational alternatives. A methodology for this type of work has to be based on menus. Menus which are created and maintained by the modelling expert. The business user will mostly work with existing process models. He will evaluate process alternatives and will implement the best solution as the new model of his tasks. This mode of operation will thereby provide for automatic update of the models and will keep the models in sync with the changing reality.     

A methodology for business process improvement and IS development

This paper aims at discussing business process modelling and improvement as an essential work to create a successful and competitive enterprise. To achieve this goal, we use a methodology called TAD, which consists of six phases. The first three deal with business process identification, modelling and improvement. The methodology presents a new unique way for business process identification, modelling, and improvement. The last three phases continue with the implementation of the improved business process(es) by developing its information system. The business process “Surgery” is used as an example to show the implementation of the methodology.     

Impact analysis and change propagation in service-oriented enterprises: A systematic review

ContextThe adoption of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM) is fairly recent. The major concern is now shifting towards the maintenance and evolution of service-based business information systems. Moreover, these systems are highly dynamic and frequent changes are anticipated across multiple levels of abstraction. Impact analysis and change propagation are identified as potential research areas in this regard.ObjectiveThe aim of this study is to systematically review extant research on impact analysis and propagation in the BPM and SOA domains. Identifying, categorizing and synthesizing relevant solutions are the main study objectives.MethodThrough careful review and screening, we identified 60 studies relevant to 4 research questions. Two classification schemes served to comprehend and analyze the anatomy of existing solutions. BPM is considered at the business level for business operations and processes, while SOA is considered at the service level as deployment architecture. We focused on both horizontal and vertical impacts of changes across multiple abstraction layers.ResultsImpact analysis solutions were mainly divided into dependency analysis, traceability analysis and history mining. Dependency analysis is the most frequently adopted technique followed by traceability analysis. Further categorization of dependency analysis indicates that graph-based techniques are extensively used, followed by formal dependency modeling. While considering hierarchical coverage, inter-process and inter-service change analyses have received considerable attention from the research community, whereas bottom-up analysis has been the most neglected research area. The majority of change propagation solutions are top-down and semi-automated.ConclusionsThis study concludes with new insight suggestions for future research. Although, the evolution of service-based systems is becoming of grave concern, existing solutions in this field are less mature. Studies on hierarchical change impact are scarce. Complex relationships of services with business processes and semantic dependencies are poorly understood and require more attention from the research community.     

Empirical evaluation of a decision support model for adopting software product line engineering

ContextThe software product line engineering (SPLE) community has provided several different approaches for assessing the feasibility of SPLE adoption and selecting transition strategies. These approaches usually include many rules and guidelines which are very often implicit or scattered over different publications. Hence, for the practitioners it is not always easy to select and use these rules to support the decision making process. Even in case the rules are known, the lack of automated support for storing and executing the rules seriously impedes the decision making process.ObjectiveWe aim to evaluate the impact of a decision support system (DSS) on decision-making in SPLE adoption. In alignment with this goal, we provide a decision support model (DSM) and the corresponding DSS.MethodFirst, we apply a systematic literature review (SLR) on the existing primary studies that discuss and present approaches for analyzing the feasibility of SPLE adoption and transition strategies. Second, based on the data extraction and synthesis activities of the SLR, the required questions and rules are derived and implemented in the DSS. Third, for validation of the approach we conduct multiple case studies.ResultsIn the course of the SLR, 31 primary studies were identified from which we could construct 25 aspects, 39 questions and 312 rules. We have developed the DSS tool Transit-PL that embodies these elements.ConclusionsThe multiple case study validation showed that the adoption of the developed DSS tool is justified to support the decision making process in SPLE adoption.