Crosscutting concern mining in business processes

One of the most complex tasks for business analysts is the consistent management of crosscutting concerns in large business processes. By crosscutting concerns the authors mean those process features that are not assigned to a single modular unit in the process and are thus scattered and tangled with other features. For example, the adaptation of the process to the user preferences involves several scattered activities that constitute a crosscutting concern. In this study, the authors propose a semi-automatic approach, based on formal concept analysis, for the identification of crosscutting concerns in business processes at design time. A preliminary evaluation of the effectiveness of the proposed technique in detecting crosscutting concerns has been provided by applying the approach to a case study.