Transforming multi-role activities in software processes into business processes

Abstract

Software processes usually include activities involving several people playing different roles. SPEM provides primitives for defining all the roles involved in each activity. Software process specification notations are not executable and thus supporting tools cannot provide this functionality. Therefore, even having a formal software process specification we cannot achieve all the potential benefits: people have difficulties in following their responsibilities, resulting in a low productivity. The business process domain provides notations that can be executed on a BPMS. There have been attempts to transform SPEM specifications into BPMN. However, there is no natural way to model multi-role tasks in BPMN, and therefore none of these proposals has solved this issue. In this paper we discuss two promising alternatives for modeling multi-role software activities in BPMN: defining compound roles and modeling multi-role tasks as independent processes. We provide an XSLT transformation for automatically generating each of these solutions from a software process specification. We use a real world running example to illustrate the approach.