A goal-oriented requirements engineering method for business processes

Abstract

Central to the development of BPMS technology was the promotion of a new language, Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a common language for describing process behaviour, shareable by business and IT, which includes business users, business analysts, and technical developers. What seems to be missing in the way that business users are supposed to use BPMN, is an explicit consideration of the strategic rationale of having certain business processes as well as support for describing business processes in terms familiar to business people. We extended current work on Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) for business process design, i.e., B-SCP framework [1] and the work of Lapouchnian et al. [2], in order to obtain an appropriate GORE for BPMN modelling method. Our first contribution is the introduction of a B-SCP metamodel, which has been implemented by means of the Eclipse Modelling Framework. Our second contribution is an Eclipse-based B-SCP editor that enables business users to specify their strategic requirements and operational tasks. Our third contribution consists of model transformations to generate BPMN skeletons out of the B-SCP model, which were implemented by means of the Atlas Transformation Language. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.