IBUPROFEN

Author(s):  
María Fernández-Ropero ◽  
Ricardo Pérez-Castillo ◽  
Mario Piattini

Organizations are increasingly choosing process-oriented organizational designs as a source to achieve competitive advantages. Business process models represent the sequence of tasks that an organization carries out. However, organizations must cope with quality problems of business process models (e.g., lack of understandability, maintainability, reusability, etc.). These problems are compounded when business process models are mined by reverse engineering (e.g., from information systems that support them), owing to the semantics loss that it involves. Refactoring techniques are commonly used to reduce these problems through changing their internal structure without altering their external behavior. Although several refactoring operators exist in the literature, there are no refactoring techniques especially developed for models obtained by reverse engineering and their special features. For this reason, this chapter presents IBUPROFEN, a refactoring technique (and supporting tool) for business process models obtained by reverse engineering. Moreover, a case study is conducted to determine how the refactoring operator's order influences the understanding and modification of business process models. The case study reveals there is a clear influence in these quality features in terms of the size and separability of the models under study, and therefore, refactoring operators do not satisfy the commutative property among them.

Author(s):  
Evellin Cardoso ◽  
João Paulo A. Almeida ◽  
Renata S. S. Guizzardi ◽  
Giancarlo Guizzardi

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goal-oriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, which obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which correspond to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. NFR catalogues were helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues’ use.


Author(s):  
Lerina Aversano ◽  
Maria Tortorella

The traceability links existing between a business process and the supporting software systems s is a critical concern for the organizations, as it directly affects their performance. Methodologies and tools are needed for detecting these kinds of relationships and keeping an evidence of the existing connections. This paper proposes an approach for modelling a business processes evidencing the links existing between their activities and the components of the supporting software systems. The approach described in this paper is concerned with the use of information retrieval techniques to software maintenance and, in particular, to the problem of recovering traceability links between the business process models and the components of the supporting software system. An information retrieval approach is introduced based on two processing phases including syntactic and semantic analysis. The application of the approach is explored through a case study.


Author(s):  
Ricardo Pérez-Castillo ◽  
Ignacio García Rodriguez de Guzmán ◽  
Mario Piattini

Archeologists investigate some scenarios by trying to understand what they are observing and how it all fits together. Archeologists have to be careful to preserve the artifacts they find and respect and understand the cultural forces that produced them. Similar to traditional archeology, Business Process Archeology is carried out similarly to traditional archeology, but engineers do not have to wait for ages so that they can comprehend unfathomable artifacts. This is due to the fact that code and business process models become legacy just about as soon as they are written or modeled. Thereby, Business Process Archeology attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are we looking at? How does it fit in with the rest of the world? and What were they thinking? This introductory chapter shows Business Process Archeology as an emerging stage within software modernization processes, focusing on understanding and recovering specific knowledge from existing software assets. Business Process Archeology consists of analyzing different software artifacts by means of reverse engineering techniques and tools in order to obtain very abstract models that depict not only the legacy systems but also the company and/or the company operation supported by this system (e.g., business process models). This chapter introduces fundaments and the basis of Business Process Archeology with some allusions to the remaining chapters of this book.


Author(s):  
Ricardo Pérez-Castillo ◽  
Ignacio García Rodriguez de Guzmán ◽  
Mario Piattini

Archeologists investigate some scenarios by trying to understand what they are observing and how it all fits together. Archeologists have to be careful to preserve the artifacts they find and respect and understand the cultural forces that produced them. Similar to traditional archeology, Business Process Archeology is carried out similarly to traditional archeology, but engineers do not have to wait for ages so that they can comprehend unfathomable artifacts. This is due to the fact that code and business process models become legacy just about as soon as they are written or modeled. Thereby, Business Process Archeology attempts to provide answers to the following questions: What are we looking at? How does it fit in with the rest of the world? and What were they thinking? This introductory chapter shows Business Process Archeology as an emerging stage within software modernization processes, focusing on understanding and recovering specific knowledge from existing software assets. Business Process Archeology consists of analyzing different software artifacts by means of reverse engineering techniques and tools in order to obtain very abstract models that depict not only the legacy systems but also the company and/or the company operation supported by this system (e.g., business process models). This chapter introduces fundaments and the basis of Business Process Archeology with some allusions to the remaining chapters of this book.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael De Almeida Rodrigues ◽  
Leonardo Guerreiro Azevedo ◽  
Kate Cerqueira Revoredo

The proper representation of a Business process is important for its execution and understanding. BPMN has been used as the standard notation for business process models, however domain specialists, which are experts in the business, do not have necessarily the modeling skills to easily read a business process model. It is easier for them to read in natural language. In this work, we propose a language-independent framework, instantiated using Java standard technology, for generating automatically natural language texts from business process models. A case study was conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated text. We found empirical support that the textual work instructions can be considered equivalent, in terms of knowledge representation, to process models represented in BPMN. Regarding the framework output quality (textual descriptions) 86% of the subjects claims that it vary from excellent to good.


2015 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 759-788 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Sánchez-González ◽  
Félix García ◽  
Francisco Ruiz ◽  
Mario Piattini

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