A business process re-engineering approach to transform BPMN models to software artifacts

Abstract

Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is becoming a de-facto standard for the specification of organizational business processes. In most cases, business processes are modeled in order to build software that may support or automate specific parts of those processes. In this work, we aim at refining BPMN models in order to automatically derive software analysis and design artifacts (e.g., UML Class Diagrams or Use Cases) from a given BPMN. These artifacts will be later on used to develop the software components (not necessarily services) automating or supporting business process activities. Our envisioned approach is based on a three-steps model transformation chain: (1) we refine the BPMN as-is model; (2) we apply process re-engineering and automation patterns to generate the BPMN to-be model; and (3) we use the resulting to-be BPMN model to derive analysis and design software artifacts. In this paper, we focus on the first two steps of the approach.