BPMNt: A BPMN extension for specifying software process tailoring

AbstractContext gh SPEM 2.0 has great potential for software process modeling, it does not provide concepts or formalisms for precise modeling of process behavior. Indeed, SPEM fails to address process simulation, execution, monitoring and analysis, which are important activities in process management. On the other hand, BPMN 2.0 is a widely used notation to model business processes that has associated tools and techniques to facilitate the aforementioned process management activities. Using BPMN to model software development processes can leverage BPMN’s infrastructure to improve the quality of these processes. However, BPMN lacks an important feature to model software processes: a mechanism to represent process tailoring. ive aper proposes BPMNt, a conservative extension to BPMN that aims at creating a tailoring representation mechanism similar to the one found in SPEM 2.0. e used the BPMN 2.0 extensibility mechanism to include the representation of specific tailoring relationships namely suppression, local contribution, and local replacement, which establish links between process elements (such as in the case of SPEM). Moreover, this paper also presents some rules to ensure the consistency of BPMN models when using tailoring relationships. s er to evaluate our proposal we have implemented a tool to support the BPMNt approach and have applied it for representing real process adaptations in the context of an academic management system development project. Results of this study showed that the approach and its support tool can successfully be used to adapt BPMN-based software processes in real scenarios. sion e proposed an approach to enable reuse and adaptation of BPMN-based software process models as well as derivation traceability between models through tailoring relationships. We believe that bringing such capabilities into BPMN will open new perspectives to software process management.