WIRES: A Methodology for Developing Workflow Applications |
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Authors: | Fabio Casati Maria Grazia Fugini Isabelle Mirbel Barbara Pernici |
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Affiliation: | (1) Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, California, USA, US;(2) Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy, IT;(3) Laboratoire I3S, Les algorithmes, Universite de Nice, Sophia Antipolis, France, FR |
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Abstract: | Workflow management systems are becoming a relevant support for a large class of business applications, and many workflow
models as well as commercial products are currently available. While the large availability of tools facilitates the development
and the fulfilment of customer requirements, workflow application development still requires methodological guidelines that
drive the developers in the complex task of rapidly producing effective applications. In fact, it is necessary to identify
and model the business processes, to design the interfaces towards existing cooperating systems, and to manage implementation
aspects in an integrated way. This paper presents the WIRES methodology for developing workflow applications under a uniform
modelling paradigm – UML modelling tools with some extensions – that covers all the life cycle of these applications: from
conceptual analysis to implementation. High-level analysis is performed under different perspectives, including a business and an organisational perspective. Distribution, interoperability and cooperation with external information systems are considered in this early
stage. A set of “workflowability” criteria is provided in order to identify which candidate processes are suited to be implemented
as workflows. Non-functional requirements receive particular emphasis in that they are among the most important criteria for
deciding whether workflow technology can be actually useful for implementing the business process at hand. The design phase
tackles aspects of concurrency and cooperation, distributed transactions and exception handling. Reuse of component workflows,
available in a repository as workflow fragments, is a distinguishing feature of the method. Implementation aspects are presented
in terms of rules that guide in the selection of a commercial workflow management system suitable for supporting the designed
processes, coupled with guidelines for mapping the designed workflows onto the model offered by the selected system. |
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Keywords: | :Extensions to UML – Methodology – Reusable patterns – Workflow – Workflows for e-services |
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