Article: Scenario-driven approach for business process development Journal: International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management (IJBPIM) 2012 Vol.6 No.1 pp.77 - 96 Abstract: The development of services-based systems starts from defining business requirements to be implemented as high-level business processes. In this paper, we describe a scenario-driven approach for developing business processes specified as WS-BPEL descriptions. We aim for simplicity in the business level notation and leverage example-like modelling principles in order to enable process sketching. The first step in our approach is to identify the essential functional requirements for business processes. The requirements are modelled as simple scenarios, each of them defining a sample run through the process, i.e., required behaviour that the underlying service-based system should allow. The scenarios, specifying sent and received messages among the services, are synthesised into a state machine. The state machine is transformed into an initial process model given in UML activity model notation. To enable mapping into WS-BPEL code, the transformation exploit domain-specific rules, i.e., our target model consists of a subset of UML with WS-BPEL specific constraints and stereotypes. The initial process model can be further refined to enable generation of executable WS-BPEL descriptions. We apply the approach on two cases, a simple process for managing loan requests and an industry case study from a logistics provider are presented. Inderscience Publishers - linking academia, business and industry through research

Title: Scenario-driven approach for business process development

Authors: A. Ruokonen; T. Kokko; T. Systä

Addresses: Department of Software Systems, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, FI-33101 Tampere, Finland. ' Department of Software Systems, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, FI-33101 Tampere, Finland. ' Department of Software Systems, Tampere University of Technology, P.O. Box 553, FI-33101 Tampere, Finland

Abstract: The development of services-based systems starts from defining business requirements to be implemented as high-level business processes. In this paper, we describe a scenario-driven approach for developing business processes specified as WS-BPEL descriptions. We aim for simplicity in the business level notation and leverage example-like modelling principles in order to enable process sketching. The first step in our approach is to identify the essential functional requirements for business processes. The requirements are modelled as simple scenarios, each of them defining a sample run through the process, i.e., required behaviour that the underlying service-based system should allow. The scenarios, specifying sent and received messages among the services, are synthesised into a state machine. The state machine is transformed into an initial process model given in UML activity model notation. To enable mapping into WS-BPEL code, the transformation exploit domain-specific rules, i.e., our target model consists of a subset of UML with WS-BPEL specific constraints and stereotypes. The initial process model can be further refined to enable generation of executable WS-BPEL descriptions. We apply the approach on two cases, a simple process for managing loan requests and an industry case study from a logistics provider are presented.

Keywords: business process development; scenario synthesis; WS-BPEL; UML; scenarios; business process modelling; functional requirements; loan requests; logistics.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2012.047892

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2012 Vol.6 No.1, pp.77 - 96

Published online: 17 Sep 2014 *

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Title: Scenario-driven approach for business process development

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