SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

II.
RELATED WORK
Business processes modeling consists of the formalization
of an organizations’ processes activities, capturing the context
in which these are executed. According to Carvalho et al. [1],
the knowledge and understanding of business processes are
extremely important to ensure that requirements are appropriate
to the real needs of the organization. In order to obtain a
complete comprehension of the business process, it is
recommended to use strategies aiming conformity of the
software requirements with the business needs. These strategies
are known as requirements elicitation approaches oriented by
business processes models. We will now describe the
approaches in which the initial proposal of the technique was
based.
Santander and Castro [12] presented guidelines that allow
the development of use cases from organizational business
models described through the i* framework [16]. These
guidelines are used to identify the scenarios that will be
described by the use cases, by using the organizational
modeling as starting point through the use of the i* framework.
An approach that uses goal oriented analysis to identify use
cases through the i* framework is pr esented in [7]. This
approach identifies use cases from business processes
modeling. Initially, a goal tree must be used to refine the
business model in order to identify the types of goals and their
actors. After that, the approach suggests to start modeling use
cases in UML (Unified Modeling Language).
The approach presented in [6] uses user case diagrams and
domain classes diagrams to t ransform business processes
models into requirements models. This approach is supported
by the RAPIDS (Rules And Process for the Development of
Information Systems) tool. This approach has two stages in
order to generate use cases from business processes models: (a)
transformation of the terms of a determined business into
domain classes; and (b) transformation of processes into use
cases by using heuristics.
The presented approaches extract user cases from business
processes models. However, before modeling use cases, it is
important to produce a document with functional and nonfunctional
requirements and business rules. Quality models
(e.g. CMMI [13]) point out that it is necessary to specify
requirements before describing components and operational
scenarios (through use cases or other forms of specification).
This scenario has motivated one of our research’s goals: to
define a technique tailored to support extracting requirements
from business process models. In the next section we will
describe the first version of the proposed technique.
III. THE REMO REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION TECHNIQUE
The REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business
process MOdeling) is a requirements elicitation technique that
guides the elicitation process of the developed software by
using business processes modeling.
The REMO technique uses a set of heuristics to extract the
software requirements from the business processes diagrams
modeled in BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Its
main goal is to aid the analysts in the identification of the
system requirements from business processes models. We
based this technique on the set of core elements of the BPMN
notation. This notation allows the identification of: the
activities, the dependencies controls, and the task flows. The
BPMN notation is a pattern to guide process modeling
suggested by the OMG (Object Management Group) [9].
Business process modeling is used as an entrance subsidy
for the technique’s application. The analyst applies the REMO
heuristics in order to obtain the software requirements.
Following the heuristics, the analyst identifies the actions
represented by the elements of the BPMN notation and
transforms them into a software requirement. In the initial
version of the REMO technique, we elaborated 8 h euristics,
divided in heuristics to identify functional requirements and
heuristics to extract non-functional requirements. Fig. 1 shows
an extract from the initial version. A detailed description of the
first version of the REMO technique can be found in [14].
Figure 1. Extract of the first version of the REMO technique.
The heuristics were based in actions contained in processes
diagrams. They aid the identification of requirements from:
processes operations; documents used within the processes
activities; decisions conditions within the processes flow;
dependencies between activities, activities with interruption
flow; activities deriving messages/communications; activities
possessing restrictions; and, activities with quality attributes. In
the next section we present the planning and the execution of
the first empirical study.
IV. FIRST EMPIRICAL STUDY
The first empirical study was carried out in or der to
evaluate the feasibility of the technique. This evaluation was
performed from indicators of effectiveness and adequacy, as
described below:
• Effectiveness: ratio between the number of real identified
requirements and the number of total known requirements
obtained from the business processes models.
• Adequacy: percentage of adequate pointed requirements
regarding the business processes context. After
identifying the requirements using the business models,
we categorized them in real or “false positives”. A
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