Extending the BPMN syntax for requirements management

Abstract

Regulations and laws are a very determining factor in every business domain. Therefore it is absolutely necessary to consider these legal constraints already in the early design phase of business processes in order to create process descriptions which are legally valid. The business process modeling notation (BPMN) has become the method of choice when it comes to business process modeling. We extended the syntax by specific artifacts in order to explicitly represent legal constraints directly in the BPMN models. Legal constraints can be considered as necessary requirements for business processes. Therefore it is important to track whether all requirements respectively legal constraints have been represented within the process models. As a consequence we extended our BPMN editor by an export functionality to be able to transfer the legal constraints as requirements into a requirements management tool. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.