Activity diagram patterns for modeling quality constraints in business processes

Abstract

Quality management is an important aspect of business processes. Organizations must implement quality requirements, e.g., according to standards like ISO 9001. Existing approaches on business process modeling provide no explicit means to enforce such requirements. UML Activity Diagrams are a well recognized way of representing those business processes. In this paper, we present an approach for enforcing quality requirements in such business processes through the application of process quality patterns to Activity Diagrams. These patterns are defined using a pattern description language, being a light-weight extension of UML Activity Diagrams. Accordingly, such patterns can be used in forward-engineering of business processes that incorporate quality constraints right from the beginning. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.